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Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
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Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#12Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#13This 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
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
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?
Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#14Why 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).
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
Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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?
It's rainbow if we skip coloring 1 and 5 and color them with grayscale instead.
Here's the question. If we can allow one color not to be "colorful" (chromatic), what pitch would that be? It's the tonic (pitch 1).
If we allow two such colors? 5 is a good candidate, it's present in almost all popular scales. (Locrian isn't very popular.)
The rest 10 colors go in rainbow by thirds, as you proposed.
So, using two grayscale colors, I've reduced the demand to make distinct enough color palette from 12 colors to 10 chromatic + 2 grayscale.
Which (10), in my experience fighting with different screens and projectors, is almost the limit of having something stable, distinguishable, nameable and memorable.
Funny enough, those 10 can be further split into 5 brighter and 5 darker pitches. Exactly as they turn from bright to dark if we go from bright to dark modes: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dku7jezn00yltb607j2un/Screens...
Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#16Why 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).
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
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
Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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 hate…
So here I stand with dilettantes :)
Being a jazz college dropout, I stopped building around standard notation when after two years of training - and I started learning piano at 25 - I still didn't get any fluency in instantly seeing harmonic structure in the scores.
I don't care that much about articulation. I can hear articulation anyways. What I care about is the elusive layer of harmony which is so hard to reason about without the right tools.
That's why people do Roman numerals, figured bass, all sorts of annotation: https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music/blob/main/parts/cla...
And that's what I was chasing. Something that gives me, a guy who didn't spent formative years of K-12 by sight-reading at the piano, a way to build mental models of how Western harmony works.
And here, I believe, I'm with the majority of people.
Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hate…
So here I stand with dilettantes :) Being a jazz college dropout, I stopped building around standard notation when after two years of training - and I started learning piano at 25 - I still didn't get any fluency in instantly seeing harmonic structure in the scores. I don't care that much about articulation. I can hear articulation anyways. What I care about is the elusive layer of harmony which is so hard to reason…
Well said! I agree. I find that standard notation is an amazing tool for conveying how to perform a piece, and absolutely terrible for understanding the harmonic structure and reasoning about a piece. That stuff is all hidden and inferred if you have the years of experience to just know all the intervals present at a glance.
Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#19Have 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.
Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
#20> 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.