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Chromatone – Visual Music Language

chromatone.center

71–80 of 97 posts

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#71
Hello, Hackers! It's me, Denis, author and developer of Chromatone. Thanks everyone for your views, opinions and very interesting links to other similar projects to learn from. I will try to implement all the insights got here in the upcoming 3.0 version of the web-site.

It's been a 7+ years solo build research and design project that is based on my own research and experiments made to explore music as an engineer and independent learner. I was a drummer when I started working on Chromatone but now I have released a number of music albums and singles as solo musician, play 2-4 live sessions a week and help others get into music in their own way.

But I'm not fanatic about the colorful notes. On the main page of web-site you can click a cog icon in the "flower" logo and then adjust any of all of 12 note colors to your preference. And this palette will be used throughout the Theory articles and Practice apps. I know that some people might have synesthesia with conflicting colors. And that those who have music in their hands already wouldn't appreciate another door to the room they're already inside of. But yeah, no matter what language you use to get into music, finally we can always close our eyes and just listen to it. The instrument stickers I make for Chromatone get smaller with the growing skill of musicians using them.

So the Chromatone web-site itself is my gift to those who would like to go the same path from wondering what are all these notes about to having a variety of instruments at hand that I can teach, explore and perform music with. And many of them are those web-apps in the Practice section.

Check out these main points of interest there:

https://chromatone.center/practice/rhythm/circle/ Very powerful polyrhythmic metronome

https://chromatone.center/practice/pitch/spectrogram/ Colorful spectrogram of incoming signal. It's showing the significance of Chromatone coloring as it's absolute and can give exact color for any given frequency and vice versa. So we can see frequencies and relations between them. You can literally see timbre as lines of harmonics present in the sound. The better the mic - the better the spectrogram resolution and quality.

https://chromatone.center/practice/chord/fifths/ Very useful interactive Circle of Fifths with MIDI support, seventh chords and 4 inversions of each available to play with. Incredibly useful instrument for composers.

https://chromatone.center/practice/chord/array/ Tonnetz diagram colored with Chromatone looks quite appealing. Choose a tonic and a scale at the panel to the left (circle with the tonic note name) it will filter out inactive notes and chords. Multitouch available.

https://chromatone.center/practice/chroma/palette/ Minimalist and efficient visualization of MIDI and analysed sound notes in a GLSL shader.

https://chromatone.center/practice/midi/monitor/ Shows all MIDI signals received in a handy table view

https://chromatone.center/practice/synth/elementary/ Main synth on the web-site is quite powerful now and has saw/square oscillators, noise oscillators, Karplus-Strong string voices, sampler voices in a polyphonic synth with some reverb and ping-pong delay added. All adjustable with the left side panel (with keyboard icon).

https://chromatone.center/practice/generative/bounce/ Generative melodies with shifted period sine waves.

https://chromatone.center/practice/jam/random/ a tool for jams - click that one button and get a random BPM and scale to jam in for the next 10 minutes or so. It's like a geolocation for a jam session.

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The project is open-source https://github.com/chromatone/chromatone.center and I'm open not only to good advice but to actual contributions to the Theory articles in Markdown and also the Practice apps code written in Vue 3, Vitepress, UnoCSS, pug and other JS ecosystem goodness. Or just give the repo a star! We're approaching v3.0 soon - it will mark the completion of ongoing cleanup of tech debt from years of early development making the site and the NPM lib (https://www.npmjs.com/package/use-chromatone) robust and usable by many new music students, explorers and performers.

AMA!

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#73
post #69

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

Yes, and how many times must Navy pannists sound, before they're forever banned? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POrxmmoR24s

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#74

What I've been obsessing about is a way to get the "feeling" of a particular piece of music.. is there a field dedicated to this study?

You mean emotion?

If yes, this page helps me enormously when I want to start writing a new song: https://legacy.wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html

I’m not sure how scientifically valid this is, but when playing these notes, I agree with their designated emotion. Though, that might just be my western brain vibing with the western brain of the author.

In any case, when I feel sad, and I press the F minor, I agree.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#75
I built a color to notes tool five years ago and even tried to get a patent on the algorithm. Be warned, there are already multiple patents on this approach and the ability to monetize this project will be limited. I know because I just went through the process myself. In a related topic, ByteDance (TikTok) has a massive portfolio of Chinese patents that are direct ripoffs of lots of foreign IP.

https://github.com/lucidbeaming/vid2midi

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, and how many times must Navy pannists sound, before they're forever banned? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POrxmmoR24s

Until they're banned, when the wind blows¹, run²

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muw7H5o14Ek

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5zb0WTSLsY

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#77
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and how many times must Navy pannists sound, before they're forever banned? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POrxmmoR24s

Until they're banned, when the wind blows¹, run² ¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muw7H5o14Ek ² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5zb0WTSLsY

I enjoyed ᑖᓐᓂᐊ ᑕᒑᖅ's Maiden cover, but continued on to polka: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui1bCBCLZZM

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#78

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 / re…

the main problem that i'm solving is that a standard notation mostly obscures structure. it's good for sight reading because people use it (like QWERTY or Chinese characters), but it's a suboptimal way to make underlining structural laws, patterns and symmetries of Western music visible

i ranted about it here: https://x.com/vitalypavlenko/status/1771820942680830417

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#79

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 in the West, but speakers of tonal languages seem to be much more likely to be able to do it https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090519172202.h...
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