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Chromatone – Visual Music Language

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Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#81

Post by creaktive »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #44

The big question underlying this kind of analogy: are the spectra of visible things (EM) and the spectra of mechanically vibrating things similar? Naively, I'd say no, so this is yet another fun but ultimately arbitrary mapping which people endlessly invent to make music. Is it deeper than I think at first glance?

I get it why this analogy is so tempting. If we consider the visible wavelengths being from 380nm to 780nm, that’s almost precisely one octave. If we could see the “ultraviolet octave”, and/or the “infrared octave”, would it resemble a rainbow? Would be neat if it did. When I was a kid, I wondered if violet and red were actually the same color, somehow. To me personally it feels like red and violet have much more in common than blue and green, for instance.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#82

Post by epiccoleman »

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.

> A few years ago, I had a student who had taken one of these teach-yourself-perfect-pitch courses, and I was fascinated. From time to time I would fire random notes at him in an attempt to catch him out... and I never could! When I asked him how the system worked, he explained that the best analogy was to think in terms of colours. For argument's sake, he said, think of Bb as sounding blue and D as a greenish colour.

> Intrigued, I played him a Cmaj7 chord and asked him to identify that. He shook his head in despair, and gave up almost immediately.

> "Can't you just home in on each note in turn and identify the separate colours?" I suggested. "Then you could look at your list of notes and figure out what the chord is."

> "No, you don't understand," he replied. "All chords sound brown to me!"

- Guthrie Govan, from Creative Guitar 1 (which, incidentally, I had to dig out to find the quote)

I imagine that Guthrie's student might have been able to combine his pitch training with some ear training and have a better shot of hearing something other than mud when he heard a chord, but this always stuck in my brain and I'm reminded of it every time I see discussions of perfect pitch. It seems like perfect pitch is barely even desirable, in this framing.

And that makes sense, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, what you really want as a musician is a great sense of relative pitch, and a good mind-body connection between the fingers and ears that lets you easily turn what you're hearing in your mind - where your ear wants to go - into actual music.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#83

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#84

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#85

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#87

Post by _gabe_ »

vitaly-pavlenko wrote: post #78
vitaly-pavlenko wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> the main problem that i'm solving is that a standard notation mostly obscures structure

Can you expand on this? I’m a hobbyist that’s learned how to sight read, and one of the coolest things was when I stopped seeing individual notes and began to see structure, as in chords and progressions. I’m not sure how sheet music would obscure the structure because that’s all I see in it now.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#88

Post by vitaly-pavlenko »

_gabe_ wrote: post #87
vitaly-pavlenko wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> the main problem that i'm solving is that a standard notation mostly obscures structure Can you expand on this? I’m a hobbyist that’s learned how to sight read, and one of the coolest things was when I stopped seeing individual notes and began to see structure, as in chords and progressions. I’m not sure how sheet music would obscure the structure because that’s all I see in it now.

I have a detailed write-up in this thread: https://x.com/vitalypavlenko/status/1771820942680830417

Basically, you can somewhat see chords in sheet music. Like, you can easily see a C major chord in a treble clef.

1) How many milliseconds does it take you to understand that the entire bar you're looking at is just a C major chord arpeggiated in different octaves?

2) What if it's a bass + treble clef? What if it's an orchestral score?

3) How fast can you verify that a treble clef is active now? That it's not a C-sharp major or a C major chord?

4) Do you actually care that it's a C major chord or rather should you care that it's a I chord (a tonic major chord)?

5) If you care about relative chords (Roman numerals), does it mean you should learn 7 to 12 times visual cues of what's going on now?

These are just the beginning questions, where the end questions that I care about are:

101) What are the backbone structures making a list of midi pitches played suddenly a tango? A ragtime? A malaguena? A Bulgarian horo?

102) What are differences between styles (languages) of specific composers? How do I rapidly see what's different between Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo? Between Chopin and Schumann? Between (tonal) Copland and (tonal) Debussy?

103) How do I imitate any of those or any fusion of those? How do I make sure that I don't miss any structural feature when I analyze and decompose their style and their pieces?

Literature: https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#89

Post by davay »

creaktive wrote: post #80

Coincidentally, I used almost the exact same palette for my own project that overlays a spectrogram on a piano keyboard https://hackaday.com/2022/04/26/pianolizer-helps-your-musica...

Oh, that's so cool! I might include your code as one of the experiments there too!

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#90

Post by _gabe_ »

vitaly-pavlenko wrote: post #88
_gabe_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the main problem that i'm solving is that a standard notation mostly obscures structure Can you expand on this? I’m a hobbyist that’s learned how to sight read, and one of the coolest things was when I stopped seeing individual notes and began to see structure, as in chords and progressions. I’m not sure how sheet music would obscure the structure because that’s all I see in it now.

I have a detailed write-up in this thread: https://x.com/vitalypavlenko/status/1771820942680830417 Basically, you can somewhat see chords in sheet music. Like, you can easily see a C major chord in a treble clef. 1) How many milliseconds does it take you to understand that the entire bar you're looking at is just a C major chord arpeggiated in different octaves? 2) What if it's a bass + treble clef? What if it's an o…

Thanks for the response! I think it would be cool to see if a different notation lends itself better to these questions, but I do believe that the classic notation we already use satisfies most of these questions. I feel like reading a natural language has a lot of similarities. When you first learn to read, you often identify individual letters, then syllables, then you begin to read words, and finally one day you can compare the stylistic similarities between two different authors.

Music has a lot of the same steps and it just takes time to get to the different stages of comprehension. At the stage I’m at now, it’s fairly easy to look at sheet music and determine if it’s ragtime or swing or jazz. I’m sure I’ll be able to pick up more nuance as time goes on too.

But, I think it’s cool that you’re exploring different approaches! I don’t want to take away from that, I just wanted to put out a challenge to the presumptions your making that classic notation is insufficient in some of these areas :)

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