Show HN: 12-colored visual interactive music theory for pop/rock MIDI (+Github)

Cool, I've applied the same color-coding principle (even if with a different schema color) to a guitar scale finder I've developed: https://www.fachords.com/tools/scale-finder/

I have a similar background to you. I am currently a full-time software developer who is very interested in classical music and music theory. I take piano lessons on a weekly basis. It's good to know that there are other like minded individuals out there.

Another project on the same topic:

  Chromatone is an ongoing research and experiment to use induced a synchronised artificial synesthesia for personal music learning and exploration

https://chromatone.center/

https://chromatone.center/practice/

Very neat btw, I think this would benefit greatly from a well edited video walking through your system.

I'm curious, are you choosing the coloring based on synesthesia evidence/survey or on an octave-compatible light frequency w.r.t. the audio frequency, or something different or arbitrary?

I'm curious are you producing music currently also? under what alias/name?

This is very interesting. Going to check it out tomorrow!

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Tldr no synesthesia (everyone is different), no "physical" idea, rather an attempt to do meaningful metaphors for I, IV, V chords and minor/major opposition.

My a bit outdated writeup: https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl?tab=readme-ov-file#12-colo...

Also I wrote why I specifically don't want to use any psychological research on color-audio relations like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5835347/:

"in this article they try to find connections between the basic parameters of sound and colors at the level of existing unconscious sensations. in particular, the “pitch” parameter (height, note) - the only parameter that interests me - is very roughly scaled by them as higher pitch and darker pitch, with a spread of four octaves. my task is to find 12 colors in order to use all 12 within one octave, and to create from them a script in which the complex and variable structures of Western music are visible. i.e. they become visible if you look closely and compare

my task is not about the basic sensations of people from high or low notes. I simply show the height of the notes along the vertical axis: high notes at the top of the screen, low notes at the bottom. I need the color to: - show semantically the same note in different octaves in the same way (C of the first octave = C of the second octave) - make horizontal bundles of three or four colors (chords) catchy. There are only about 20 main chords (but there is also a long tail of rare ones)

Let me give you an analogy with natural language. Let’s say the Russian language doesn't have a script yet, and here we come linguist missionaries, and we are trying to create an optimal alphabet for the Russian people. Of course, research can be carried out about which letter is more similar to the vowel [a] or the vowel [u] in the Bouba/kiki sense. but the best alphabet is one that respects the statistical properties of vowel usage in that language. in particular, it correctly reflects that in this language there are only two vowel sounds (Abkhazian) or as many as twenty (Danish). if there are twenty of them, then we better have twenty contrasting letters (or not?)

and as a result, Georgian “u”, Hindi “u” and Arabic “u” are not similar to each other at all, and for some reason all three writing systems work perfectly

I have two main requirements for my system: - so that the most frequency structures from the Western musical tradition are striking (I did this as much as possible) - so that 12 colors are the most contrasting, incl. for people with different forms of vision color deficiency"

Thanks for asking! I went to music theory specifically because I didn't want to produce anything before I analyze enough music (like, thousands of compositions). That is, I didn't want to talk music and do marketing on my compositions until I learn it on a level of B2, at least.

I personally felt very dumb from all guides on how to start making music in an hour. I felt like I've given a nice caligraphy pen (and a helium balloon) to say something, yet I haven't read even anything in the language that I'm gonna be talking in. Should I, at the bare minimum, understand any structural context of what was done before me? How prog rock was done, on a level of notes (or timbres)? Bulgarian folk songs? Turkish improvisation? That kind of stuff.

I like it when people normalize that "simply" doing music theory as opposed to composition/production is "just fine". A "Note Doctors" podcast is great in this: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/note-doctors/id1530735...

(I admit it's a nerdy and very corner-case road. I come from a background of learning many languages as a hobby, so I understand why I'm broken the way I am. I appreciate it when people can "just" compose, unlike me.)

Great to hear!

I've spent last two years doing college-level piano studies (pre-conservatiorum, i.e. nominally Year 8-9, was more like Year 4-5 because I lacked any childhood piano background).

Sadly, my program wasn't great in many aspects. A huge portion was devoted to perfecting the playing of pieces by heart (I did some Mozart, some Bach and some Beethoven). While I've learnt a good deal on interpretation, expression and fingering when I meditated on what I'm forced to do, I'd much better spend more time on writing out tons of jazz improvisations using some rules given, learn some idiomatic patterns on a keyboard and the like. So I quit.

Now, for the last seven months I don't have any piano teacher, and I feel so much freedom every time I play the instrument. I don't play anything that I've tried to learn from sheet music. I hate the whole process. Rather, I gradually develop my own improvisations. Not in an intricate and highly restrictive bebop jazz idiom. Rather, something quite tonal and functional, yet with scales, interesting harmonies, stretching the boundaries and the like.

My greatest joy is that I've noticed I subconsciously started building large forms from it, on the spot. I previously lacked enough attention. I feel like I'm an LLM with a loss of my previous listener's experience doing random stuff for many epochs.

I'm curious to hear, what's your request to your teacher, and how happy are you with what are you doing at classes?

As my friendly recently said "I ditched Ableton and started writing demos directly into muscle memory"

My request to my teacher is that he teach pieces that I find interesting. Currently, I am working on pieces by Chopin and Milhaud. I am very satisfied with my classes. I find that they help me to take my mind off of my job, which can be very boring and monotonous at times.

> because I didn't want to produce anything before I analyze enough music

Just wanted to say be careful with self limiting thoughts. I never saw myself even as a musician because I am largely self taught.

It wasn't really until I was having a chat with a great musician/composer that I have tremendous respect for. He made a comment that I was a great musician when we were talking about the topic of "being a musician". Those few words from him made a huge impact on my life.

I think what I'm trying to say is: write stuff, produce stuff. You don't have to publish it or you could publish under pseudonym if you like. The fear of failure has held me back an awful lot and it's still crippling sometimes.

Btw I'm very happy to do a demo over Zoom. Every background is differnt, so I benefit a lot from sharing various aspects of what I know during these calls and thinking how to bake this knowledge into the platform. Reach out: cxielamiko@gmail.com, or preferably t.me/vitalypavlenko

Thank you! For me, it's not a fear of failure. It's a fear of meaninglessness. I feel like the culture where people generally running around and reaffirming each other that "studying anything from the past isn't necessary because that's not how creativity works" is toxic.

finding meaning in my own music has been a journey.

Once you learn how all the tools and patterns around music work, what do you want to do with it is the natural next question.

For me finding genuine emotion, feeling, and story that can be inscribed in a song has been a huge challenge. Moreso as I got older, my younger ego would love to share every emotion, thought, and color. My older ego is more reserved and feels less of these emotions and thoughts are worthy of encoding into song.