Musical Notation of Non-Musical Courses

Good graphic representations are a great help to directly see patterns in research results.Courses are no exception. However, a course means that time has to be a component in the representation. If the components are few, it is easy to draw conventional graphic representations over a time axis.However, if there are more than, say, 12–15 components under study the result becomes unreadable. If, instead, we use musical notation we can notate hundreds of components with the time given according to the time scale that suits the data. Readability is kept. The method is developed for two special cases; courses, where the duration of components is known, and courses where the order of components is known but not their duration. Information is shown on one or several staves as something resembling a musical score. As a by-product a modified musical notation is shown to be useful also for complicated cross-sections. These are working methods facilitating final analysis in making directly readable what should otherwise be exceeding the range of vision.