See chords as flags

Details

External ID

45826472

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

See chords as flags

Website domain

rawl.rocks

Launched

Nov. 5, 2025

Cohort

—

Upvotes

129

Upvotes percentile

0.9213973799126638

Tags

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Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

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)

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