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Chromatone – Visual Music Language

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Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#31

Post by mncharity »

pohl wrote: post #12

The most compelling use of color in music theory that I've encountered is a color scheme where individual notes are given primary colors (yellow, red, blue) like this: C is yellow, C#/Db is red, D is blue, D#/Eb is yellow,...etc First observation: the notes of each of the three diminished tetrads are monochromatic (their notes all have the same color.) Then, look at the major minor triads and assign them secondary co…

Going the other way, using a sound analogy to teach color theory, I played with a {B4:red,C:orange,C#:yellow,D:green,D#:green,E:blue,F:violet} map - frequency scaling with offset. With an equalizer-like keyboard - intensity from touch location, and displayed on the key. So kbd/equalizer to synth to spectrogram to scale-and-offset to pretend-they-are-lasers to a restricted spectra to color space and color. Keyboarding color in a color space via spectra.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#33

Post by a2128 »

tgv wrote: post #20

What is it? The web site doesn't work (FF, Windows & macOS). If they really propose replacing pitch by color, how are they going to get people to tell minute differences apart? How are they going to display chords, or polyphony? Octaves? And as if written notation doesn't exclude enough people, they're now also excluding color-blind people, some 5% of the male population where I live.

Website is unusable for me on Firefox as well. Nothing is clickable and "This page is slowing down Firefox. To speed up your browser, stop this page". If I block 3rd party scripts and frames in uBlock then it works better

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#34

Post by keymasta »

keymasta wrote: post #28
jdietrich wrote: post #27

_

I really like the link you provided and have watched it before! But - I do want to say that C == green is not arbitrary at all. It is consistent with my calculations, which are consistent with Newton's calculations. Usually I see the colours being assigned to notes as wrong.. but this C == green is consistent with mapping light, using octave equivalence, given by the following: f_prime = f * 2 ** (i / 12) # Where, #…

Not sure why I got down voted but the parent has deleted their post so ok! :D

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#36

Post by recursive »

This seems kind of like inventing a QWERTY alternative. The best thing about QWERTY is that its ubiquitous and good enough, not that it's optimal.

Although in the case of chromatone, I don't see any arguments made about technical improvements. Instead of spelling note names with letters, we have colors. Why is this better? This some argument about the visible spectrum mapping. But like, how is that useful? I can tell a group of working musicians "1-4-2-5 in E minor", and we'd probably be able to play something moderately coherent based on that. How do I do that in Chromatone? What's the advantage?

Most people (aside from those with perfect pitch) experience pitch relatively. Things like intervals or scale degree given a tonic. Maybe there's something interesting one could do mapping colors to something in this domain, a la solfege, like a minor 9 chord becomes green or something. I'm still not totally sure what the point would be. Maybe you could read a chart quicker.

But like, what's the problem in traditional notation/theory that we're trying to solve here?

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#39

Post by pohl »

pohl wrote: post #12

The most compelling use of color in music theory that I've encountered is a color scheme where individual notes are given primary colors (yellow, red, blue) like this: C is yellow, C#/Db is red, D is blue, D#/Eb is yellow,...etc First observation: the notes of each of the three diminished tetrads are monochromatic (their notes all have the same color.) Then, look at the major minor triads and assign them secondary co…

I forgot I wanted to include a couple of links:

Here's a video someone made to describe the idea better than I have:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjR13Jz7YYw

Here's a screenshot of a Tonnetz I drew in SwiftUI using this color scheme:

https://imgur.com/a/metaharmony-tonnetz-c-major-6th-diminish...

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#40

Post by karmakaze »

spankalee wrote: post #8

Is there an easy-to-digest overview or even examples anywhere? I see a bunch of pretty deep-dive articles, a long video, a lot of tools, but I can't see a description of how the supposed visual language works yet, or even examples. How does this system represent notes and chords over time?

Yeah, I kept skipping sections of the video over all the theory of hearing parts and found that the "most popular visualization" discussion/demo starts at 27:40 and just before at 24:22 shows the hue coloring by distance from/to root note on x-axis (and dissonance shown on y-axis but unclear how that's utilized).

One common trap(?) they fell into is allocating hues by frequency, where humans are far more sensitive in distinguishing hues between red and green. So many of the blue/greens look pretty much the same. It may have been intentional because those higher intervals matter less but wasn't clear.

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