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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

#21

Post by CGMthrowaway »

vitaly-pavlenko wrote: post #17
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

OK let me suggest something to meet you halfway. As someone who is fluent/sight reading/ singing etc and can "hear" harmony and/or "read" it on a page of regular notes (lines and spaces and intervals all you really need, but to your point requires experience), something that would be far more interesting and useful to me, rather than color-coding solfege, would be something more along these lines:

Color code each chord by its diatonic value (e.g. in a I chord every note in the triad is red, in a IV chord every note in the triad is blue) and then highlight the extended notes as well (e.g. add 9 is yellow, add 11 is green)

That is something that MIGHT be interesting to me (personally - I know I am not your audience). But even thinking it through this technique sort of washes out the interesting bits of substitution/interpretation etc that you can find because you are committing to interpreting a chord with a single root

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#22

Post by recursive »

kazinator wrote: post #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…

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

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#23

Post by [deleted] »

recursive wrote: post #22
kazinator wrote: post #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…

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

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#24

Post by kazinator »

recursive wrote: post #22
kazinator wrote: post #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…

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

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

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#25

Post by vitaly-pavlenko »

kazinator wrote: post #24
recursive wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

In all cases of tonicization I decided whether to notate a brief tonic change or not (piece by piece, case by case): https://rawl.rocks/s/applied/chain_of_dominants

You can always manually "probe", minutely "recolor": click on a measure number and hover a potential new tonic.

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#26

Post by kazinator »

vitaly-pavlenko wrote: post #25
kazinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In all cases of tonicization I decided whether to notate a brief tonic change or not (piece by piece, case by case): https://rawl.rocks/s/applied/chain_of_dominants You can always manually "probe", minutely "recolor": click on a measure number and hover a potential new tonic.

OK, so this is a case of personal knowledge transfer, which is valuable for that reason. You take your expert opinion that certain things are happening functionally in the music, and encode it in color.

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#27

Post by vitaly-pavlenko »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #21
vitaly-pavlenko wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK let me suggest something to meet you halfway. As someone who is fluent/sight reading/ singing etc and can "hear" harmony and/or "read" it on a page of regular notes (lines and spaces and intervals all you really need, but to your point requires experience), something that would be far more interesting and useful to me, rather than color-coding solfege, would be something more along these lines: Color code each cho…

Yeah, I see your point. You want same alterations on different Roman numerals to look the same. (In my current system b9 over I and b9 over V look different.)

I briefly explored this appoach: https://rawl.vercel.app/edit?a=beethoven_op10no1mov1 (Although it was a mess.)

In current Rawl terms I call it "annotate modulation at every chord".

Back in the days I thought it's better.

It turned out that:

- You need to do tedious annotation. So you can only work with classical repertoire datasets like https://github.com/MarkGotham/When-in-Rome

- Worse even, you need to look at two places simultaneously: to the score and to the string of Roman numerals

- And worse still, all chords then look the same. The score itself becomes bland. Most of the time, if you aren't deep inside the jazz repertoire, there isn't that many alterations. So you'd mostly see the same four colors - root, minor third, major third, perfect fifth.

- And, as evident in Mozart-Beethoven repertoire, you need to decide what to do with fully diminished chords. Because they sorta don't have a root, acoustically.

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#28

Post by CGMthrowaway »

vitaly-pavlenko wrote: post #27
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK let me suggest something to meet you halfway. As someone who is fluent/sight reading/ singing etc and can "hear" harmony and/or "read" it on a page of regular notes (lines and spaces and intervals all you really need, but to your point requires experience), something that would be far more interesting and useful to me, rather than color-coding solfege, would be something more along these lines: Color code each cho…

Yeah, I see your point. You want same alterations on different Roman numerals to look the same. (In my current system b9 over I and b9 over V look different.) I briefly explored this appoach: https://rawl.vercel.app/edit?a=beethoven_op10no1mov1 (Although it was a mess.) In current Rawl terms I call it "annotate modulation at every chord". Back in the days I thought it's better. It turned out that: - You need to do te…

Thanks for the example. Devils advocate:

> You need to do tedious annotation. Worse even, you need to look at two places simultaneously: to the score and to the string of Roman numerals

The more work it takes to create your notation, the more useful information it contains. Developer-user tradeoff

> And worse still, all chords then look the same. The score itself becomes bland. Most of the time, if you aren't deep inside the jazz repertoire, there isn't that many alterations. So you'd mostly see the same four colors - root, minor third, major third, perfect fifth.

Isn't the same true for your current method? Only there are more colors of the rainbow to distract you from how bland it is :)

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#29

Post by recursive »

kazinator wrote: post #24
recursive wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I might be using the terminology wrong, but I wouldn't call a I-IV resolution V-I, even though it's the same relative movement. Nor would I call it a key change. I would say downward movement of a fifth is common in western music, but the feel is different for different resolution targets. To me, it seems more clear or explanatory to keep the colors encoded as scale degrees of the current key, not the local cadence-resolution-target or whatnot.

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#30

Post by midenginedcoupe »

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.

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