Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore • Hacker News Board

Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#1

Post by vitaly-pavlenko » Wed, Nov 05, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

I designed a relative piano-roll-based music notation. I used 12 colored arranged in a specific way to make visible the main effects and oppositions of Western tonal harmony. The tonic is always white, so a manual annotation/interpretation is required for each MIDI file.

All chords are flags of three to four colors. Minor mode is darker, major mode is lighter. Colors are arranged in thirds.

I sorted the pieces from simple complex harmony. I also wrote a bit of text to explain what you may see. There's also a corpus of structures: hyperlinks of tags that allow you to find similar patterns throughout my corpus of 3000+ popular pieces.

My method makes chord progressions memorizable and instantly visible in the scores. No preparation of Roman numeral analysis / chord symbols analysis is required. After a bit of training the chords will stare right in your eyes.

It's not synesthesia, it's a missing script for tonal music which makes harmonically identical things look the same (or similar).

I've also recorded lectures on my method in Russian (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzQrZe3EemP5pVPYMwBJG...). I'm sorry I haven't yet found time to re-record in English.

I've also sketched a friendlier intro: https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/

Sorry, but this thing won't make any sense if you're color-blind.

It's open-source: https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl

Earlier context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165596

(Back then colors were less logical, and there was no corpus of 3000+ piece annotated yet)

Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
rawl.rocks

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#2

Post by FelipeCortez » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

very cool! hookpad/hooktheory/theorytab [1] is a similar idea, but I think the annotations are created using their tool instead of sourced from MuseScore.

[1]: https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#3

Post by MrGilbert » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

I love that breakdown you did here: https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/ Very cool!

Also makes me jump right into strudel.cc and experiment with chords, progressions and melodies.

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#4

Post by hamaqueto » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

This is one of the cases where choosing a better palette would improve the visualizations

As now, there's no relationship between colors beyond different notes, different colors

Perhaps choosing similar colors by distance on the circle of fifths or similar

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#5

Post by greggsy » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 3:40 PM UTC

Seems to crash Safari on iOS, which is pretty rare for me tbh.

Not sure what did there but it could either be profitable or annoying for you.

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#6

Post by CGMthrowaway » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

Why use this piano-roll visualization rather than just color coding notes on sheet music? You lose a lot of other information in the process (like, almost all of it).

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#7

Post by thrtythreeforty » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #6

Why use this piano-roll visualization rather than just color coding notes on sheet music? You lose a lot of other information in the process (like, almost all of it).

You're very close to Aikin shape note heads! These help sight-read in any key, since they're always shaped according to whatever the relative major is, and so it's easy to learn the intervals between any two shapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_B._Aikin

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#8

Post by vitaly-pavlenko » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

hamaqueto wrote: post #4

This is one of the cases where choosing a better palette would improve the visualizations As now, there's no relationship between colors beyond different notes, different colors Perhaps choosing similar colors by distance on the circle of fifths or similar

They are actually similar by circle of thirds. They go as 1-3-5-7-2-4 over the rainbow.

This makes main triads be smooth gradients instead of random three-color flags.

1 and 5 pitches are neutral because:

- they are neutral (a hollow tonic power chord)

- they don't convey any information about the scale. they only give a reference point to measure everything else against

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#9

Post by CGMthrowaway » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #7

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #6

Why use this piano-roll visualization rather than just color coding notes on sheet music? You lose a lot of other information in the process (like, almost all of it).

You're very close to Aikin shape note heads! These help sight-read in any key, since they're always shaped according to whatever the relative major is, and so it's easy to learn the intervals between any two shapes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_B._Aikin

Yeah this is basically shape notes with colors, in a MIDI format. Not helpful for non-digital musicians

Re: Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

#10

Post by vitaly-pavlenko » Thu, Nov 06, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

FelipeCortez wrote: post #2

very cool! hookpad/hooktheory/theorytab [1] is a similar idea, but I think the annotations are created using their tool instead of sourced from MuseScore. [1]: https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab

Yes! hooktheory was my main inspiration over the years.

One downside of hooktheory is that it's a reduction which someone should make for you beforehand. That is:

- it's losing information

- if no one analyzed a song yet, there's nothing you can do about it

And, although I don't have an easy way to upload MIDIs yet rather than "you ask me to upload it and I'll do it", I don't do any reduction of the (sonic) score itself.