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See chords as flags

Visual harmony of top composers on musescore

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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/rawlEarlier context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165596(Back then colors were less logical, and there was no corpus of 3000+ piece annotated yet)

HN · launched Nov 5, 2025 · 129 upvotes (top 8%) · 0 views

Niche: music education and practice apps · 185 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▼ -36% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • Analytics & BI
  • Prosumer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes It is an interactive music visualization web app that parses MIDI files and renders color-coded piano-roll harmonies on an HTML5 canvas or SVG.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: MuseScore, Hooktheory, Standard notation with Roman numerals/figured bass

Concerns raised: Playback position marker lags 1-2 beats behind audio, Requires tedious manual annotation for key change tracking, Hard-coded colors change upon transposition, not functionally consistent, Visual density sacrifices articulation, dynamics, tempo markings, and performance notation, Missing LH/RH hand indication and legato/phrasing notation

Feature requests: Support secondary dominants and tonicization tracking, Color code by diatonic chord value with extended note highlights (add 9, add 11), Explore shaped notes system as alternative to color coding, Easier MIDI upload without manual request process, Show performance notation (articulation, dynamics, phrasing) alongside harmony visualization

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 256 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #25 of 257 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Looks like the first mover among its competitors.

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