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

129 points by vitaly-pavlenko ↗ HN
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)

10 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] thread
hamaqueto
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

greggsy
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
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).
docheinestages
Don't you need a license to publish copyrighted melodies?
coreyp_1
Have you ever explored the idea of shaped notes?

There's multiple different approaches with both 4-shape and 7-shape systems being common. But the point is that your color system seems largely correlated to it, and there has been research done on the shape note system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note

kazinator
> This simplifies visual analysis: chords like [uncopyable image of color bars] and other structures become visible, scores become readable and interpretable.

The colors are hard-coded to pitches, and so change upon transpositions. For instance a V-I cadence in different keys is functionally the same, but will be colored differently.

It does help highlight common tones between nearby chords.

Other than that, it's not doing anything for me in terms of seeing function.

midenginedcoupe
Pro jazz trombonist here. All there is to usefully say about piano roll notation, with or without colours has pretty much already been said. And if you want more (much more) detail, then Tantacrul (designer on MuseScore) has done a great video.

https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4?si=lcjA8fF4e3dINvmX

The only useful head's up I can give is the current position marker on your playback is quite a long way behind the audio, around 1-2 beats on the one piece I tried.