A music notation system for a two dimensional keyboard consists of a five line staff per hand, where lines represent black keys and spaces represent white keys. The lines are vertically oriented, and spaced to resemble the pattern of black and white keys in an octave of piano keys. Note-octave symbols are placed on a line or space, indicating which column of keys the desired note is in. A note-octave symbol graphically indicates which row of octaves the desired note is in by the location of a note head on the stem of the note-octave symbol. A horizontal row in the notation represents an instant of time, at a particular subdivision of the beat. Solid horizontal lines indicate measure boundaries. Dashed horizontal lines indicate beat boundaries. The number of subdivisions of a given beat is indicated by the number of rows between the beat boundaries.