That works, and would be an improvement, so long as your rhythms are based on constant integer subdivisions.
It's possible (and fun) to play music where the rhythmic structure changes smoothly and continuously. But it's bloody impossible to notate and very difficult to orally communicate, so music cultures that depend on notation or oral communication have left this territory largely unexplored.
The handful of classical composers that have attempted this (Steve Reich, Brian Current, etc) have either abandoned western notation (Reich) or hacked on their own bespoke glyphs with their own situation-specific explanations (Current).
Electronic musicians can easily explore this space by writing their own software (Autechre, your humble author, etc). When your musicians are mechanical, you can explore all sorts of otherwise impractical permutations of theory.
Most delightful, though, are the non-western cultures that communicate musical ideas entirely without written notation or spoken language, and instead communicate musical ideas through play (Indonesian Gamelan, Australian Aborigines, etc). You get the ineffable human qualities that make music most beautiful, and the freedom to explore structural spaces that are difficult to capture with discrete/unitized/quantized notation and language.
> But it's bloody impossible to notate and very difficult to orally communicate
It's really easy to orally communicate. You can just sing it!
(I know what you mean, is it's difficult to describe using a computer keyboard. Using a pen and paper it is really easy, given that you can just draw notes and time signature changes in the margin.)
It's possible (and fun) to play music where the rhythmic structure changes smoothly and continuously. But it's bloody impossible to notate and very difficult to orally communicate, so music cultures that depend on notation or oral communication have left this territory largely unexplored.
The handful of classical composers that have attempted this (Steve Reich, Brian Current, etc) have either abandoned western notation (Reich) or hacked on their own bespoke glyphs with their own situation-specific explanations (Current).
Electronic musicians can easily explore this space by writing their own software (Autechre, your humble author, etc). When your musicians are mechanical, you can explore all sorts of otherwise impractical permutations of theory.
Most delightful, though, are the non-western cultures that communicate musical ideas entirely without written notation or spoken language, and instead communicate musical ideas through play (Indonesian Gamelan, Australian Aborigines, etc). You get the ineffable human qualities that make music most beautiful, and the freedom to explore structural spaces that are difficult to capture with discrete/unitized/quantized notation and language.