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

https://rawl.rocks/
64•vitaly-pavlenko•21h ago
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)

Comments

FelipeCortez•1h ago
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

vitaly-pavlenko•16m ago
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 score itself.

MrGilbert•1h ago
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.

hamaqueto•1h ago
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

vitaly-pavlenko•18m ago
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

greggsy•1h ago
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.

CGMthrowaway•31m ago
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).
thrtythreeforty•21m ago
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

CGMthrowaway•18m ago
Yeah this is basically shape notes with colors, in a MIDI format. Not helpful for non-digital musicians

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

https://rawl.rocks/
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