Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore (opens in new tab)

(rawl.rocks)

129 pointsvitaly-pavlenko4mo ago28 comments

I designed a relative piano-roll-based music notation. I used 12 colored arranged in a specific way to make visible the main effects and oppositions of Western tonal harmony. The tonic is always white, so a manual annotation/interpretation is required for each MIDI file.

All chords are flags of three to four colors. Minor mode is darker, major mode is lighter. Colors are arranged in thirds.

I sorted the pieces from simple complex harmony. I also wrote a bit of text to explain what you may see. There's also a corpus of structures: hyperlinks of tags that allow you to find similar patterns throughout my corpus of 3000+ popular pieces.

My method makes chord progressions memorizable and instantly visible in the scores. No preparation of Roman numeral analysis / chord symbols analysis is required. After a bit of training the chords will stare right in your eyes.

It's not synesthesia, it's a missing script for tonal music which makes harmonically identical things look the same (or similar).

I've also recorded lectures on my method in Russian (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzQrZe3EemP5pVPYMwBJG...). I'm sorry I haven't yet found time to re-record in English.

I've also sketched a friendlier intro: https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/

Sorry, but this thing won't make any sense if you're color-blind.

It's open-source: https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl

Earlier context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165596

(Back then colors were less logical, and there was no corpus of 3000+ piece annotated yet)

28 comments

hamaqueto4mo ago

This is one of the cases where choosing a better palette would improve the visualizations

As now, there's no relationship between colors beyond different notes, different colors

Perhaps choosing similar colors by distance on the circle of fifths or similar

vitaly-pavlenkoOP4mo ago

They are actually similar by circle of thirds. They go as 1-3-5-7-2-4 over the rainbow.

This makes main triads be smooth gradients instead of random three-color flags.

1 and 5 pitches are neutral because:

- they are neutral (a hollow tonic power chord)

- they don't convey any information about the scale. they only give a reference point to measure everything else against

markburns4mo ago

1-3-5-7-2-4

I would imagine that would be red(1), orange(3), yellow(5), green(7), blue(2), purple(4)

But it seems you have white(1), green(3), grey(5), yellow(7), red(2), purple(4)

I can't quite see what going over the rainbow in thirds here means, but I can see why a fifth would be neutral. Could you expand upon this?

1 more reply

midenginedcoupe4mo ago

Pro jazz trombonist here. All there is to usefully say about piano roll notation, with or without colours has pretty much already been said. And if you want more (much more) detail, then Tantacrul (designer on MuseScore) has done a great video.

https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4?si=lcjA8fF4e3dINvmX

The only useful head's up I can give is the current position marker on your playback is quite a long way behind the audio, around 1-2 beats on the one piece I tried.

FelipeCortez4mo ago

very cool! hookpad/hooktheory/theorytab [1] is a similar idea, but I think the annotations are created using their tool instead of sourced from MuseScore.

[1]: https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab

vitaly-pavlenkoOP4mo ago

Yes! hooktheory was my main inspiration over the years.

One downside of hooktheory is that it's a reduction which someone should make for you beforehand. That is:

- it's losing information

- if no one analyzed a song yet, there's nothing you can do about it

And, although I don't have an easy way to upload MIDIs yet rather than "you ask me to upload it and I'll do it", I don't do any reduction of the (sonic) score itself.

MrGilbert4mo ago

I love that breakdown you did here: https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/ Very cool!

Also makes me jump right into strudel.cc and experiment with chords, progressions and melodies.

coreyp_14mo ago

Have you ever explored the idea of shaped notes?

There's multiple different approaches with both 4-shape and 7-shape systems being common. But the point is that your color system seems largely correlated to it, and there has been research done on the shape note system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note

kazinator4mo ago

> This simplifies visual analysis: chords like [uncopyable image of color bars] and other structures become visible, scores become readable and interpretable.

The colors are hard-coded to pitches, and so change upon transpositions. For instance a V-I cadence in different keys is functionally the same, but will be colored differently.

It does help highlight common tones between nearby chords.

Other than that, it's not doing anything for me in terms of seeing function.

recursive4mo ago

No, they're not. They're coded to scale degrees. V-I cadence will be the same color in all keys and inversions.

kazinator4mo ago

OK, so it tracks key changes? How about secondary dominants: V-I cadences targeting any scale degree at any time.

2 more replies

CGMthrowaway4mo ago

Why use this piano-roll visualization rather than just color coding notes on sheet music? You lose a lot of other information in the process (like, almost all of it).

thrtythreeforty4mo ago

You're very close to Aikin shape note heads! These help sight-read in any key, since they're always shaped according to whatever the relative major is, and so it's easy to learn the intervals between any two shapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_B._Aikin

CGMthrowaway4mo ago

Yeah this is basically shape notes with colors, in a MIDI format. Not helpful for non-digital musicians

vitaly-pavlenkoOP4mo ago

Fair point.

In my approach I got very dense yet readable information density on the screen. Eg. the entire Mov. 1 of Moonlight sonata is a single screen on my 16" Mac, yet all tonal effects are there, visible: https://rawl.rocks/f/Sonate_No._14_Moonlight_1st_Movement

CGMthrowaway4mo ago

The first movement. Which is 4 pages long. You could display 2 pages on a 16" screen, so you improved density by 2x but you have no articulation, no dynamics or tempo markings, no legato/phrasing notation, no LH/RH indication.

If you really wanted to show the harmony as densely as possible you could fit the whole movement on 1 page with figured bass and a comment or two about how to play the arpeggios.

I'm not a hater, I encourage the exploration. Just get personally frustrated when we aren't ever building on 1000 years of music notation and instead starting with MIDI and DAW style slop - it's not value-add for serious classically trained artists, and (imo) pushes music dilettantes in the wrong directions

1 more reply

db48x4mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

greggsy4mo ago

Seems to crash Safari on iOS, which is pretty rare for me tbh.

Not sure what did there but it could either be profitable or annoying for you.

docheinestages4mo ago

Don't you need a license to publish copyrighted melodies?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore (opens in new tab)

(rawl.rocks)

129 pointsvitaly-pavlenko4mo ago28 comments

All chords are flags of three to four colors. Minor mode is darker, major mode is lighter. Colors are arranged in thirds.

It's not synesthesia, it's a missing script for tonal music which makes harmonically identical things look the same (or similar).

I've also recorded lectures on my method in Russian (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzQrZe3EemP5pVPYMwBJG...). I'm sorry I haven't yet found time to re-record in English.

I've also sketched a friendlier intro: https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/

Sorry, but this thing won't make any sense if you're color-blind.

It's open-source: https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl

Earlier context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165596

(Back then colors were less logical, and there was no corpus of 3000+ piece annotated yet)

28 comments

hamaqueto4mo ago

This is one of the cases where choosing a better palette would improve the visualizations

As now, there's no relationship between colors beyond different notes, different colors

Perhaps choosing similar colors by distance on the circle of fifths or similar

vitaly-pavlenkoOP4mo ago

They are actually similar by circle of thirds. They go as 1-3-5-7-2-4 over the rainbow.

This makes main triads be smooth gradients instead of random three-color flags.

1 and 5 pitches are neutral because:

- they are neutral (a hollow tonic power chord)

- they don't convey any information about the scale. they only give a reference point to measure everything else against

markburns4mo ago

1-3-5-7-2-4

I would imagine that would be red(1), orange(3), yellow(5), green(7), blue(2), purple(4)

But it seems you have white(1), green(3), grey(5), yellow(7), red(2), purple(4)

I can't quite see what going over the rainbow in thirds here means, but I can see why a fifth would be neutral. Could you expand upon this?

1 more reply

midenginedcoupe4mo ago

https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4?si=lcjA8fF4e3dINvmX

The only useful head's up I can give is the current position marker on your playback is quite a long way behind the audio, around 1-2 beats on the one piece I tried.

FelipeCortez4mo ago

very cool! hookpad/hooktheory/theorytab [1] is a similar idea, but I think the annotations are created using their tool instead of sourced from MuseScore.

[1]: https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab

vitaly-pavlenkoOP4mo ago

Yes! hooktheory was my main inspiration over the years.

One downside of hooktheory is that it's a reduction which someone should make for you beforehand. That is:

- it's losing information

- if no one analyzed a song yet, there's nothing you can do about it

And, although I don't have an easy way to upload MIDIs yet rather than "you ask me to upload it and I'll do it", I don't do any reduction of the (sonic) score itself.

MrGilbert4mo ago

I love that breakdown you did here: https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/ Very cool!

Also makes me jump right into strudel.cc and experiment with chords, progressions and melodies.

coreyp_14mo ago

Have you ever explored the idea of shaped notes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note

kazinator4mo ago

> This simplifies visual analysis: chords like [uncopyable image of color bars] and other structures become visible, scores become readable and interpretable.

The colors are hard-coded to pitches, and so change upon transpositions. For instance a V-I cadence in different keys is functionally the same, but will be colored differently.

It does help highlight common tones between nearby chords.

Other than that, it's not doing anything for me in terms of seeing function.

recursive4mo ago

No, they're not. They're coded to scale degrees. V-I cadence will be the same color in all keys and inversions.

kazinator4mo ago

OK, so it tracks key changes? How about secondary dominants: V-I cadences targeting any scale degree at any time.

2 more replies

CGMthrowaway4mo ago

Why use this piano-roll visualization rather than just color coding notes on sheet music? You lose a lot of other information in the process (like, almost all of it).

thrtythreeforty4mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_B._Aikin

CGMthrowaway4mo ago

Yeah this is basically shape notes with colors, in a MIDI format. Not helpful for non-digital musicians

vitaly-pavlenkoOP4mo ago

Fair point.

CGMthrowaway4mo ago

If you really wanted to show the harmony as densely as possible you could fit the whole movement on 1 page with figured bass and a comment or two about how to play the arpeggios.

1 more reply

db48x4mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

greggsy4mo ago

Seems to crash Safari on iOS, which is pretty rare for me tbh.

Not sure what did there but it could either be profitable or annoying for you.

docheinestages4mo ago

Don't you need a license to publish copyrighted melodies?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse