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

129 points by vitaly-pavlenko 11mo 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=PLzQrZe3EemP5pVPYMwBJGtiejiN3qtCce 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/ 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 https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl Earlier context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165596 (Back then colors were less logical, and there was no corpus of 3000+ piece annotated yet)

FelipeCortez 11mo 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 https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab
- vitaly-pavlenko 11mo 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 (sonic) score itself.
MrGilbert 11mo ago
I love that breakdown you did here: https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/ https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/ Very cool! Also makes me jump right into strudel.cc and experiment with chords, progressions and melodies.
hamaqueto 11mo 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 11mo 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
  - markburns 11mo ago
    1-3-5-7-2-4 I would imagine that would be red(1), orange(3), yellow(5), green(7), blue(2), purple(4) But it seems you have white(1), green(3), grey(5), yellow(7), red(2), purple(4) I can't quite see what going over the rainbow in thirds here means, but I can see why a fifth would be neutral. Could you expand upon this?
    - vitaly-pavlenko 11mo ago
      It's rainbow if we skip coloring 1 and 5 and color them with grayscale instead. Here's the question. If we can allow one color not to be "colorful" (chromatic), what pitch would that be? It's the tonic (pitch 1). If we allow two such colors? 5 is a good candidate, it's present in almost all popular scales. (Locrian isn't very popular.) The rest 10 colors go in rainbow by thirds, as you proposed. So, using two grayscale colors, I've reduced the demand to make distinct enough color palette from 12 colors to 10 chromatic + 2 grayscale. Which (10), in my experience fighting with different screens and projectors, is almost the limit of having something stable, distinguishable, nameable and memorable. Funny enough, those 10 can be further split into 5 brighter and 5 darker pitches. Exactly as they turn from bright to dark if we go from bright to dark modes: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dku7jezn00yltb607j2un/Screenshot-2025-11-06-at-21.22.38.png?rlkey=4og571ms22ptku776d39ok4lp&st=jqgitgn5&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dku7jezn00yltb607j2un/Screens...
greggsy 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_B._Aikin
  - CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
    Yeah this is basically shape notes with colors, in a MIDI format. Not helpful for non-digital musicians
- vitaly-pavlenko 11mo ago
  Fair point. In my approach I got very dense yet readable information density on the screen. Eg. the entire Mov. 1 of Moonlight sonata is a single screen on my 16" Mac, yet all tonal effects are there, visible: https://rawl.rocks/f/Sonate_No._14_Moonlight_1st_Movement https://rawl.rocks/f/Sonate_No._14_Moonlight_1st_Movement
  - CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
    The first movement. Which is 4 pages long. You could display 2 pages on a 16" screen, so you improved density by 2x but you have no articulation, no dynamics or tempo markings, no legato/phrasing notation, no LH/RH indication. If you really wanted to show the harmony as densely as possible you could fit the whole movement on 1 page with figured bass and a comment or two about how to play the arpeggios. I'm not a hater, I encourage the exploration. Just get personally frustrated when we aren't ever building on 1000 years of music notation and instead starting with MIDI and DAW style slop - it's not value-add for serious classically trained artists, and (imo) pushes music dilettantes in the wrong directions
docheinestages 11mo ago
Don't you need a license to publish copyrighted melodies?
db48x 11mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4
coreyp_1 11mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note
kazinator 11mo ago
> 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.
- recursive 11mo ago
  No, they're not. They're coded to scale degrees. V-I cadence will be the same color in all keys and inversions.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kazinator 11mo ago
    OK, so it tracks key changes? How about secondary dominants: V-I cadences targeting any scale degree at any time.
    - vitaly-pavlenko 11mo ago
      In all cases of tonicization I decided whether to notate a brief tonic change or not (piece by piece, case by case): https://rawl.rocks/s/applied/chain_of_dominants https://rawl.rocks/s/applied/chain_of_dominants You can always manually "probe", minutely "recolor": click on a measure number and hover a potential new tonic.
      - kazinator 11mo ago
        OK, so this is a case of personal knowledge transfer, which is valuable for that reason. You take your expert opinion that certain things are happening functionally in the music, and encode it in color.
    - 11mo ago
midenginedcoupe 11mo ago
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 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.

129 points by vitaly-pavlenko 11mo ago

FelipeCortez 11mo 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 https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab

vitaly-pavlenko 11mo 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 (sonic) score itself.

MrGilbert 11mo ago

I love that breakdown you did here: https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/ https://vpavlenko.github.io/d/ Very cool! Also makes me jump right into strudel.cc and experiment with chords, progressions and melodies.

hamaqueto 11mo 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 11mo 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
- markburns 11mo ago
  1-3-5-7-2-4 I would imagine that would be red(1), orange(3), yellow(5), green(7), blue(2), purple(4) But it seems you have white(1), green(3), grey(5), yellow(7), red(2), purple(4) I can't quite see what going over the rainbow in thirds here means, but I can see why a fifth would be neutral. Could you expand upon this?
  - vitaly-pavlenko 11mo ago
    It's rainbow if we skip coloring 1 and 5 and color them with grayscale instead. Here's the question. If we can allow one color not to be "colorful" (chromatic), what pitch would that be? It's the tonic (pitch 1). If we allow two such colors? 5 is a good candidate, it's present in almost all popular scales. (Locrian isn't very popular.) The rest 10 colors go in rainbow by thirds, as you proposed. So, using two grayscale colors, I've reduced the demand to make distinct enough color palette from 12 colors to 10 chromatic + 2 grayscale. Which (10), in my experience fighting with different screens and projectors, is almost the limit of having something stable, distinguishable, nameable and memorable. Funny enough, those 10 can be further split into 5 brighter and 5 darker pitches. Exactly as they turn from bright to dark if we go from bright to dark modes: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dku7jezn00yltb607j2un/Screenshot-2025-11-06-at-21.22.38.png?rlkey=4og571ms22ptku776d39ok4lp&st=jqgitgn5&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dku7jezn00yltb607j2un/Screens...

greggsy 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_B._Aikin
- CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
  Yeah this is basically shape notes with colors, in a MIDI format. Not helpful for non-digital musicians
vitaly-pavlenko 11mo ago
Fair point. In my approach I got very dense yet readable information density on the screen. Eg. the entire Mov. 1 of Moonlight sonata is a single screen on my 16" Mac, yet all tonal effects are there, visible: https://rawl.rocks/f/Sonate_No._14_Moonlight_1st_Movement https://rawl.rocks/f/Sonate_No._14_Moonlight_1st_Movement
- CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
  The first movement. Which is 4 pages long. You could display 2 pages on a 16" screen, so you improved density by 2x but you have no articulation, no dynamics or tempo markings, no legato/phrasing notation, no LH/RH indication. If you really wanted to show the harmony as densely as possible you could fit the whole movement on 1 page with figured bass and a comment or two about how to play the arpeggios. I'm not a hater, I encourage the exploration. Just get personally frustrated when we aren't ever building on 1000 years of music notation and instead starting with MIDI and DAW style slop - it's not value-add for serious classically trained artists, and (imo) pushes music dilettantes in the wrong directions

docheinestages 11mo ago

Don't you need a license to publish copyrighted melodies?

db48x 11mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3bUFgEcb4

coreyp_1 11mo ago

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

kazinator 11mo ago

> 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.

recursive 11mo ago
No, they're not. They're coded to scale degrees. V-I cadence will be the same color in all keys and inversions.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- kazinator 11mo ago
  OK, so it tracks key changes? How about secondary dominants: V-I cadences targeting any scale degree at any time.
  - vitaly-pavlenko 11mo ago
    In all cases of tonicization I decided whether to notate a brief tonic change or not (piece by piece, case by case): https://rawl.rocks/s/applied/chain_of_dominants https://rawl.rocks/s/applied/chain_of_dominants You can always manually "probe", minutely "recolor": click on a measure number and hover a potential new tonic.
    - kazinator 11mo ago
      OK, so this is a case of personal knowledge transfer, which is valuable for that reason. You take your expert opinion that certain things are happening functionally in the music, and encode it in color.
  - 11mo ago

midenginedcoupe 11mo ago

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 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.