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Chromatone – Visual Music Language

chromatone.center

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Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#61

Post by recursive »

pimlottc wrote: post #54
slaymaker1907 wrote: post #46

This really doesn't reflect the actual structure of Western music for those without absolute pitch (the vast majority of people). Instead, it's pretty much just relations that matter between pitches which makes things way more difficult to visualize. Mixing red and blue gives you a different color than red and green, but A-C is pretty much the same as Bb-Db, they're both minor thirds. If you want to analyze it algori…

> This really doesn't reflect the actual structure of Western music for those without absolute pitch (the vast majority of people). It’s worth mentioning that this includes the majority of musicians (professional and otherwise). Having perfect pitch is in no way necessary to be an excellent player or composer of music. Most of the greats didn’t have it. It is a very rare skill.

It's very rare, and also not very correlated with musical skill. Some people just have it, seemingly inherently, even without any formal musical training.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#62

Post by sssilver »

pimlottc wrote: post #54
slaymaker1907 wrote: post #46

This really doesn't reflect the actual structure of Western music for those without absolute pitch (the vast majority of people). Instead, it's pretty much just relations that matter between pitches which makes things way more difficult to visualize. Mixing red and blue gives you a different color than red and green, but A-C is pretty much the same as Bb-Db, they're both minor thirds. If you want to analyze it algori…

> This really doesn't reflect the actual structure of Western music for those without absolute pitch (the vast majority of people). It’s worth mentioning that this includes the majority of musicians (professional and otherwise). Having perfect pitch is in no way necessary to be an excellent player or composer of music. Most of the greats didn’t have it. It is a very rare skill.

I wouldn’t even call it a “skill”, but perhaps a “trait”

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#63

Post by davay »

a2128 wrote: post #33
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

Yeah, it happens some times when you refresh the page before the wasm audio engine is loaded - then you just need to close the window and wait for 10-15 seconds before the background processes finish and the web-site should open just fine

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#64

Post by davay »

pachico wrote: post #2

It wouldn't be bad if it had some colour blindness mode.

Actually the colors there are adjustable! You can click the cog icon in the circle of notes on the main page and change colors of each note individually - it will affect colors in most places all over the web-site. You can even make it black and white back again )

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#66

Post by vitaly-pavlenko »

recursive wrote: post #36

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…

that's a great point. i'm making my alternative https://rawl.rocks/ which does exactly that: a relative color-coding, starting from the tonic

aside from that, I make a library of structures used in Western music (in the header). I've started saving structures a week ago, so there isn't much content right now

the main emergent property of my system is visibility of structures. chords, chord progressions, parallel / relative modulation symmetries suddenly make sense and are viscerally perceivable

and I hope my visualizations are directly useful in a context of speaking about music theory to people without sheet music experience (or, dare I say, without 10 years of such experience)

my thing is open source: https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#67

Post by rerdavies »

pimlottc wrote: post #54
slaymaker1907 wrote: post #46

This really doesn't reflect the actual structure of Western music for those without absolute pitch (the vast majority of people). Instead, it's pretty much just relations that matter between pitches which makes things way more difficult to visualize. Mixing red and blue gives you a different color than red and green, but A-C is pretty much the same as Bb-Db, they're both minor thirds. If you want to analyze it algori…

> This really doesn't reflect the actual structure of Western music for those without absolute pitch (the vast majority of people). It’s worth mentioning that this includes the majority of musicians (professional and otherwise). Having perfect pitch is in no way necessary to be an excellent player or composer of music. Most of the greats didn’t have it. It is a very rare skill.

And probably more of a curse than a blessing. Having to listen to Kind of Blue with the awful knowledge that it's 1/3 of a tone flat from concert pitch: that's something I'd rather live without.

Among professional musicians who have perfect pitch, it's considered more of a curse than a blessing.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#69

Post by defrost »

HPsquared wrote: post #68

Are there any musical instruments with the notes arranged in a circle like that? Notes are in a repeating cycle after all. Different octaves could be further in/out layers.

Steel drums are tuned to have notes in a circle - the patterns used can vary, sometimes it's a linear Transmission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mm6ycEz2A8

Hang drums might interest you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_(instrument)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk3BvNLeNgw

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#70

Post by jeffhuys »

dberst wrote: post #23

For those lost from the landing page here's a visualization that worked for me on mobile (chrome/android) https://see.chromatone.center/ There's a bunch of web apps in the "Practice" section of the site: https://chromatone.center/practice/ https://chromatone.center/practice/experiments/ https://chromatone.center/practice/sound/

Page seems to work fine on mobile for me (Orion browser)
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