Foreword

You are about to encounter a favorable mix of music theory at its most formal – music notation – and a musical genre that remains to be an opposing force to any established musical form – turntablism. You will also see a remarkably successful example of turning theory into useful practice. Whether the reason that you read this is because you are a DJ, a music scholar, a tutor, a hip-hop fan, a contemporary culture reader, a system designer, or just plain interested, you will be struck by the extensiveness of Alexander Sonnenfeld’s S-Notation system for transcribing scratch performances. He has developed the system during several years, and it has been a privilege to follow its maturation to what it has become.

Theorizing and studying DJ-made music was for long a relatively lonely endeavor: in 1997, when I started my university degree project on understanding what scratching DJs really do, there were few sources of information to fnd, and none academically reliable, and there was little general interest in hip-hop music as a scholarly subject. During my doctoral studies, the number of published studies increased a bit, although most had focus on technology and the interface. In my 2010 thesis entitled “The acoustics and performance of DJ scratching. Analysis and modeling”, there is a chapter (5.3) devoted to music notation. It is very short. By the year 2007, only four systems based on traditional notation had been published: Doc Rice (1998), Hansen (1999), Radar (2000), and Webber (2007). These systems were simple compared to S-Notation which was introduced in 2009. Two graphical systems were suggested by A-Trak (2000), and Raedawn`s & Carluccio’s TTM (2000); TTM resembled guitar tablature notation.

Why then do we need to fnd a notation format? The music and culture of hip-hop do not really encourage one such, if we read Katz (2012). According to a small study in my thesis, only 23% of the asked DJs had ever used one (Hansen, 2010). Sophy Smith (2006) gave fve main functions of turntable notation: 1) for communicating musical ideas, 2) for documentation, 3) for composition, 4) for making scratching a legitimate musical practice, and 5) for analyzing and understanding. 

The thesis you are about to read addresses all, although one can hope that the fourth item should be unnecessary! But it is also worthwhile to fip the question: why should there not be a notation format? Music notation is despite its many and known shortcomings the acknowledged method for addressing Smith’s points above for (nearly) all other instruments in the world of music. 

Although my personal academic interest barely stretches beyond the scratching activity of a DJ – and this is also where I consider S- Notation to be most applicable and effcient – the system leaves headroom for other kinds of instruments and musical directions. These can be within the scope of NIMEs (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), within the concept of controllerism, or any other derivative of DJ-made music than scratching. Finding purposeful notation that can cover what traditional notation misses is still a major concern in musicology. With S-Notation, we have a new contender to be reckoned with, and which is waiting to be scrutinized.

The other direction this thesis takes is to incorporate the whole notation system in the larger context of tutoring and skill practice. In my doctoral work I stated that despite that DJing and scratching had been widely popular since the 1980s, there were few books on learning how to DJ, and I speculated it was because hip-hop was opposing the established culture, so that a scholarly take on hip-hop would fail. However, there have been other ways of learning, most notably self-produced teaching material published freely within the DJ communities, instructional videos from competitions, DJs and companies (e.g., Technics DMC World, 2005; DJ Q-bert, 2003, 2005; Scratch DJ Academy, 2003; Shure, 2001; Vestax, 1997). 

In following years a great number of educational books were published (see for instance, Brewster and Broughton, 2002; Frederikse and Sloly, 2003; Sloly and Frederikse, 2004; Webber, 2007; DJ Chuck Fresh, 2004; Slaney, 2006; Steventon, 2006; Wood, 2006). However, these handbooks mostly give advice on general aspects of being a DJ, and very little has been published on the actual skill learning itself. As far as I can judge, this is the frst systematic approach comparable to classics such as Arban’s for trumpet players or Jeanjean’s Vademecum for clarinetists.

One reason that this approach is beneficial is that the playing techniques of scratching are very well defned, almost as made for studying. Some of the work in Hansen (1999) involved classifying the different techniques as they were described in various sources at the time (e.g. in videos, internet communities, and by performers). The classification was based on looking at which controllers that were operated in the combination of hand movements. Basically, there are single- and two-handed techniques, where two-handed means one hand controls the crossfader and one hand the record movement. Based on the reported fndings, a typical (two-handed) technique would