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Chromatone – Visual Music Language

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Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#91
post #59

Someone sure did put a lot of work into this. I can appreciate that. That said, as a musician, I’d prefer if someone just told me the key and progression, or just started playing and I could jump in. I’m not that good with colors.

Chromatone is useful on the way there while you're still learning those keys and scales. Just open that panel with a note name on the left, choose click the tonic note and choose a scale and you will immediately see the notes to play on your keyboard and guitar/ukulele without any need to memorize or calculate the interval steps. Then you memorize them and don't need the colors any more. But they help you get there m…

From personal experience, I think having to unlearn the trigger(s) - in this case a specific colour creates more difficulty than its worth. You're intentionally coupling then de-coupling neuronal networks, and the de-coupling is harder than the coupling.

It also makes me wonder how much cognitive dissonance this may cause for those with synaethesia who already have their own thing going on.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#92
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're color-coding with the root note (or key?) being red which makes more sense than coloring the note names. Similar to how hearing perfect pitch can be a bit of an annoyance (with unnecessary detail) than useful.

No, they're definitely assigning the colors to the pitch class. It's not relative to the tonic of the key. I remember that being a stumbling block for me, because I like things that are independent of key. But, no, a C major triad is most certainly orange because C is yellow, and E and G are both red. I ultimately made peace with this because the greater goal is to break you out of the key prison so you can learn to…

Thanks for the clarification. So I suppose this is a different way than key + II/ii/etc notation where one would think of implicit key as a color and be aware of consonant/dissonant colors which are certain distances/hues from that color.

I'm not really buying that we can interpret degrees of hue differences to identify which ones are consonant/dissonant when the base/reference color is changing. I would certainly expect our hue perception and usage to be absolute and not relative--vs pitch perception being mostly relative.

I can't say how a certain green is 'higher' than a red by the same amount a certain blue is higher than a green. It's requiring us to develop the same intuitions we already have for pitch for hues--creating a problem rather than solving one (if I'm understanding this correctly).

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#93

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.

What is the key of electronic music?

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#94
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're definitely assigning the colors to the pitch class. It's not relative to the tonic of the key. I remember that being a stumbling block for me, because I like things that are independent of key. But, no, a C major triad is most certainly orange because C is yellow, and E and G are both red. I ultimately made peace with this because the greater goal is to break you out of the key prison so you can learn to…

Thanks for the clarification. So I suppose this is a different way than key + II/ii/etc notation where one would think of implicit key as a color and be aware of consonant/dissonant colors which are certain distances/hues from that color. I'm not really buying that we can interpret degrees of hue differences to identify which ones are consonant/dissonant when the base/reference color is changing. I would certainly ex…

> I'm not really buying that we can interpret degrees of hue differences to identify which ones are consonant/dissonant when the base/reference color is changing.

That's definitely not the aim here. There's nothing here related to consonance/dissonance, and there are no variations in hues. There's just one red, one yellow, one blue, one orange, one purple, and a single green: six fixed colors altogether.

So a major/minor triad that has one yellow note and two red notes is the same shade of orange as one that has two yellow notes and one red note.

The utility and beauty of the colors is that the 3 primary colors — and their equal-parts mixing forms secondary colors — makes an astonishing metaphor for how individual notes mix to create base triads that have one of 3 musical functions, which correspond to the secondary colors.

Then, in addition to that, the color of extension notes (which will again be primary colors) seem to make that chord "want to resolve" to chords where the base triad is the complement of that extension note's color.

One can try to take the metaphor too far, but just this much is compels me.

There are other interesting details, though, like all augmented triads and sus2 or sus4 triads are tri-color, which seems to align well with their functional ambiguities.

If you look at the screenshot of the Tonnetz I linked to elsewhere in the thread, it seems that what we feel when we sense that we have moved from one chord-function to another (in some chord progression) actually comes from moving from one of the diagonal secondary-color "lanes" in the tonnetz to another.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#95
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromatone is useful on the way there while you're still learning those keys and scales. Just open that panel with a note name on the left, choose click the tonic note and choose a scale and you will immediately see the notes to play on your keyboard and guitar/ukulele without any need to memorize or calculate the interval steps. Then you memorize them and don't need the colors any more. But they help you get there m…

From personal experience, I think having to unlearn the trigger(s) - in this case a specific colour creates more difficulty than its worth. You're intentionally coupling then de-coupling neuronal networks, and the de-coupling is harder than the coupling. It also makes me wonder how much cognitive dissonance this may cause for those with synaethesia who already have their own thing going on.

I'm super curious about this project because I am currently trying to deeply learn music, but it is very difficult to get to a meaningful point of really "understanding" music and theory if you only have the time of a modern adult to commit to it. However I largely agree with you about this unfortunately. Do you think this person's project, where they use colors for relative notation is better?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442831

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#96
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From personal experience, I think having to unlearn the trigger(s) - in this case a specific colour creates more difficulty than its worth. You're intentionally coupling then de-coupling neuronal networks, and the de-coupling is harder than the coupling. It also makes me wonder how much cognitive dissonance this may cause for those with synaethesia who already have their own thing going on.

I'm super curious about this project because I am currently trying to deeply learn music, but it is very difficult to get to a meaningful point of really "understanding" music and theory if you only have the time of a modern adult to commit to it. However I largely agree with you about this unfortunately. Do you think this person's project, where they use colors for relative notation is better? https://news.ycombinat…

I couldn't say. I only know that my personal experience of using Rocksmith to learn guitar meant I couldn't bust out a song perfectly without looking at the screen, even if I could get 100% in expert (no visible notation) mode for some songs.

The 60hz refresh visual input was 'expected' by my brain to be there in order to coordinate my body with correct timing, intonation etc. i.e. it seemed to be mixed in with my so called 'muscle memory'.

One other thing that was most noticeable is the gamification noises (e.g. the noise you get for reaching the 25x multiplier) became part of my mental model, and when I recognised this and turned them off in the options, my inability to play that part of song nearly as well became extremely evident, although persisting with the option set to off allowed me to overcome it.

Re: Chromatone – Visual Music Language

#97

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?

Physically, they're pretty analogous. But perceptually, sound and sight are very different. We're much less interested in abstract visual arrangements and there's no visual analog of harmony.

Maybe I'll add that our "detectors" for sight and sound operate on different principles.

Our sight system is a camera, capturing a 2-D image of the world. Color is picked up by 3ish sensors that have broadband frequency responses, meaning that a huge amount of information on the actual spectral content of the light is discarded. Countless spectral combinations get flattened into individual color values.

Our sound system approximates a Fourier-like decomposition of sound into frequency bins at points in time. It preserves much more spectral fidelity, but very little spatial fidelity.

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