Devanagari/Musical Notation

Devanagari, the script used for the likes of Hindi, Rajasthani and often Sanskrit, and its allied North Indian scripts such as Bengali and Gurumukhi, have an interesting resemblance to Western musical notation, with a horizontal line from which the individual characters "dangle" or occasionally project above. The exception to this is Gujurati, which has plain characters with no line and the South Indian scripts also lack the line entirely.

Musical notation is superficially similar. It often has a vertical line linking notes below which the notes dangle or sometimes above which they project. There are also signs indicating other features.

These can be combined. Each character, or more accurately cluster of characters, represents a syllable, which is also a note. These syllables can be conjunct consonants, similar to how notes can be written on the same vertical line when they occur together. A breve can be represented by a hollow outline of a letter. Where a syllable occurs alone and is of crotchet length, it can be written without a line as in Gujurati or the South Indian scripts. The script can also be used for non-Indian languages.

Hence you end up with a musical manuscript with staves, treble and bass clefs, time signatures and the rest, which represents song lyrics and melody in one go. There is no more need for them to occur on different lines. The song is completely represented by one set of characters.

Oddly, this wouldn't work for traditional Indian music.