Show HN: Chord Progressions
peterburk.github.io
peterburk.github.io
> There is also no E#. It just doesn't exist. Get used to it. Those are the 12 notes.
Technically not true. There is an E#, it's called F. If you are playing in F# major[1], the scale has an E# in it.
> Musicians never play notes one at a time. They always use chords.
Most lead guitar parts are not chords. Typically playing in a band context will create a chord from multiple instruments, but that isn't always the case.
What kind of weird statement even is that? What about the first few notes of Fur Elise?
> There is a chord called "C major", but it's totally different to the note called "C".
... the E and G of the C major chord are prominent overtones of the note.
depends on the instrument. A pure sine wave at the frequency of C does not have any overtone.
I meant to add more to my top comment. I think the author does fairly well at their mission despite potential nit picks like that. It is really cool to see somebody learning and being excited about putting all the pieces together. The beautiful thing about music is you can go deeper and deeper as much as you want, and there are various competing ideas about what it is and how to talk about. Programming has a similar kind of depth to it.
This guy has also obviously never met the strange and rare creature known as a 'bass player'.
And that's without mentioning oddities like most varieties of bagpipes or the hurdy-gurdy, where a constant drone is present. It doesn't exactly form chords with the other notes, but it's still more than one note being played at a time!
Source: I am a bass player
Singers who are not overtone singers (pretty much everyone).
What kind of weird musician is this person limited to?
[1]: Yes, it's an opinion. Yes, it's an informed opinion, and implying in one way or another that I just must Not Get It will not faze me. I do Get It, and that's why I find it distasteful.
Then, I took a class on electronic music composition. For my own project in the spirit of the avant garde, I wanted to challenge myself to write something "musical" without resorting to the traditional concepts of pitch-based melody and harmony or quantized rhythm. It turns out, there are many other levers you can play with to create the effect of an musical arc. Not to pat myself on the back, but I think the end result is evocative in a similar sense as tonal music. If I had the time, I would do more.
Check it out here, if you like: https://soundcloud.com/acjohnson/wanderers
I have neither the time nor the desire to fully explain my point in an HN post, but I would note that the music community itself has been asking questions in this direction in the last decade or so, if you want to follow up on it, as the academic music community asks themselves exactly how they got to where they are now, so disconnected from the rest of the world at large and so utterly irrelevant to almost anything musically occurring today. (Not just pop music; that is structurally inevitably insipid, really, so who cares, but irrelevant to anything other than their own very little world.)
I learned this by asking a friend in the CouchSurfing meetup who brings a guitar or a roll-out piano. And as I say, I can't play any instrument myself.
Maybe if I want to learn, I should choose an instrument that uses single notes, it might be easier.
Regarding singing though, my ex-girlfriend told me to sing more quietly in church because it sounds so bad.
It's not just limited to bass/lead guitarists either - finger style acoustic guitarists don't play just chords. OK, often the fingerings are chord patterns, or arpeggiated chords, but that's not always the case. Checkout the title track from Bensusan's album, "Intuite", that is mostly just a single note melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di1qQsGcaIc (it would appear the ending is cut off this track here, but it gives you the idea).
I'd say the easiest / most immediately rewarding way is to pick up a guitar or similar (banjo / uke / banjolele / mandolin etc) and learn a few chords. Although people who can do that aren't exactly in demand so there's a case for learning the onde martineau or glass harmonica or something - that way if you get decent at it you can actually get paid to do it.
> A machine learning program is also called a "neural net".
A neural net is just one example of a machine learning model.
Whoa... Plus, they're identical only in equal temprament
Indeed, those lines are dramatically oversimplifying, but it makes the comments section more exciting and the article shorter.
Perhaps it'll scare off people who were planning to do machine learning audio analysis. But at least they'll get an idea of how complicated it can be.
It would probably blow the authors mind to know that some scales have sharps and flats, including the ones
sorry
It was not an "accidental"
The dude's mind is going to be blown when he learns about double sharps and flats.
When I looked it up, I saw that it's just another name for G.
https://www.basicmusictheory.com/a-double-flat-note
The fact that the same thing has 2 names, but then the same name (e.g. C) can mean 3 different things (note, chord, key) really confuses me. I'm a beginner (can't play any instrument), so this is just about trying to cover the basics and generate a machine learning dataset. If I weren't so confused already, I might try to learn an instrument. It seems to be really time-consuming to practice though, and I'd need a teacher to listen and correct my mistakes. I wouldn't notice when I get it wrong if I try to teach myself.
As for which whistle to buy, get one in the key of D. A Walton's little black should be about $6, one of their slightly better brass whistles around $11, and a Generation nickel D is about $12. If you really want to splurge Susato makes a very nice high D for $50 (their Kildare S series), but it's quite loud and more for if you are playing before an audience. The most expensive whistles around are probably Burke's, at $230 for a high D. So even if you end up collecting Burke whistles obsessively and getting one in every key he makes you'll still be out less money than buying some high-end guitars!
The one disadvantage is that they're diatonic instruments. That means you can play in one key, and only one key, without cross-fingering the whistle.
For tuning, I recommend either an electronic tuner or the program Flutini[2], assuming you get a tunable whistle (the cheap ones aren't and it probably won't matter much).
[1] https://thesession.org/ [2] http://www.novasession.org/Flutini/
That said, Abb isn't another name for G - it's a distinct thing which, when played on typical musical instruments, is played the same way as a G. Basically note names to note frequencies is a many-to-one mapping.
If you want to understand the hairy details start by googling just vs equal temperament. But I went down that rabbit hole, and it hasn't made my procedural music any better, so I wouldn't really recommend it.
- A pitch standard, like A440, which anchors one arbitrarily chosen note to a specific frequency.
- A tuning system, which defines the frequency ratios between notes.
Almost all modern music assumes _A440_ and _12-tone equal temperament_. In 12TET, adjacent flats and sharps map to the same frequency. It's said that they are _enharmonic_. But there are many other systems where this isn't true. In _just intonation_, notes are defined by simple frequency ratios, and there is no enharmonicity at all. Every number of sharps and flats map to different frequencies.
For string or wind instruments playing without keyboards, there is no temperament. Each note represents a range of possible pitches, and what pitch you choose depends on the notes around it. For example, if you are repeating or holding a note, you don't want it to change pitch. But if the harmony around that note is changing, it may be in tune at one point in time, then out of tune at a later one. String quartet playing involves a great deal of working out compromises about what pitch each note should have.
Knowing a little about how instruments work and learning some music theory can help tremendously, but you can actually just start poking around in a MIDI roll or tracker and go a long way.
Unless you're really into a specific instrument, starting off with any modestly priced keyboard with pressure sensitivity and MIDI out (USB-based if it's modern) will let you have fun with synths and sampled instruments you'd probably never be able to afford.
If you really want to learn a physical instrument that's easy to pick up, you can get a $20 plastic ocarina and find lots of tutorials on YouTube.
Down with E exceptionalism.
http://wildsparx.com/rhythatom/
Coincidentally I just finished it. Source is here:
https://github.com/wildsparx/rhythatom
In theory it should run in any Chrome/Chromium browser, but I've received several reports of rhythatom failing to play. Would appreciate any help or ideas.
If you look at: https://peterburk.github.io/chordProgressions/ChordProgressi...
There doesn't seem to be any indication of major/minor. One way to interpret that is "always use the diatonic." Which means only use notes in the key, which means chords (1,4,5) are major while (2,3,6) are minor. However songs can have non-diatonic chords.
If you look at Rhyathatom, it defaults to the well-worn 1645 progression - the 6 is explicitly minor, which makes it diatonic. Try making the 6 major and you get a different animal - kind of sinister! That's a non-diatonic chord.
Maybe the author accounted for this elsewhere.
> There doesn't seem to be any indication of major/minor.
There's a line in there about capital/lowercase of roman numerals not being important, by which I hope the author meant out of scope of the article. So I think they were explicitly just enumerating the chords of the diatonic scale.
I like that I can choose the number of beats, unlike Jake Albaugh's arpeggiator (although that has some other interesting features).
An AudioContext in a cross origin iframe must be created or resumed from a user gesture to enable audio output.
G.snd.init @ (index):98
init @ (index):464> A chord is 3 notes played at the same time.
It's not like you have to dig too deep to discover four-note 7th chords, diminished/augmented, inversions, etc...
"There's also 7th chords, Augmented chords (+), and Diminished (º) chords. As far as we're concerned, there's a lookup table that lets us turn these chords into notes."
Who am I kidding? This is the age of crapping some mangled mis-information out onto a blog or web page in the hope of raising one's profile and securing a job with the next hot startup creating $10k robots delivering $5 pizzas or whatever.
And sure, perhaps you and I can easily distinguish the subtle difference between 'Musicians always use chords' (obviously wrong) and 'Musicians always work, individually or together, within a key, which is an abstracted but well-defined set of tones that can be combined in time series or simultaneously to produce an inexplicably pleasant experience in the listener, by some neurological magic that has never been adequately explained' (non-obviously correct) but y'know what, I actually am willing to let little gems like that slide because they're adequate approximations of the truth that allow good folks to proceed on a journey that may one day lead them to, just maybe, have the arrogance required to belittle the uninitiated.
I do agree though, that to do somethimg, learn something, have something almost correct is better than having learned and done nothing, but as Bill Evans points out in the youtube video about the learning process, it's much better to start with something simple, concrete, and which you know as true then build from there, than start approximating (incorrectly) lots of things at once. So it's a case by case basis, but it's not merely gratuitous arrogance that motivates people to call other people out on false statements.
This is just like saying that very few people in the world have a solid grasp of computer programming... Do you know that there are hundreds of university departments in the world where the only thing people do is, wait for it... having a solid grasp of musical theory!?
The whole music investigation was a side-project, compared to my main efforts on Pingtype (a Chinese learning site). https://pingtype.github.io
I got interested because my friends at the KHOP prayer room gave me the song sheets in PDF format. They have the chords written, and the key on the top right. I thought it would be interesting to figure out which songs go well together so I could make some playlists. Even though I can't play music, I listen a LOT - all day in the office, and while I bike to work.
The fact this side project got more upvotes than my language-learning interests, and your encouragement that the data might be useful, is a sign to me that I should keep on with this and maybe learn to play. There's a piano in the house I rent, but I don't know what to do with it. It seems like now might be a good time to start learning.
Also - the notation in question is confusing and overcomplicated, and ignoring corner cases makes a lot of sense if you don't care about outliers.
It's not like that notation handles all kinds of music well anyway.
> For some reason I don't totally understand, some have 2 names (e.g. C#=Db, D#=Eb, F#=Gb, A#=Bb).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament
Some famous music for the well temperament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier
Then rather than distributing the scripts the author presumably used to do the enumerating and translating, they are distributing the outputs of the scripts, as a huge tarball full of midi files. Not sure what the motivation here was.
If you can read AppleScript, go ahead and use it.
The way I see it, most people prefer to take existing data (e.g. Kaggle datasets) and build machine learning tools on that, instead of having to compile everything from source and make their own data.
Rust? JavaScript?
C#? ;-)
To illustrate this, first listen to the default 1645 progression on rhythatom. Then change the octave of row 2 (4maj chord) from +0 to +1. Can you hear its similar role in the progression, even though it's now stressed by being up an octave?
He then explained that I should move the key, and when I transposed the MIDI table, the Parsons codes all became the same.
I then asked him, is it possible to move up an octave for just one part of a chord progression? He said yes, it's possible, but people don't do that often. Normally people wait until the end of a chord progression to change octave.
The matter of which notes to play for a given chord is called "voicing", and it's orthogonal to anything mentioned in your article.
It's actually C Eb G. The difference is that D# is an augmented 2 while Eb is a minor 3. They sound the same but they have totally different functions.
Some info: http://publish.uwo.ca/~emacphe3/pipes/acoustics/pipescale.ht...
Getting that to sound right in MIDI requires the use of pitch bends, since MIDI only understands 12 tone equal temperament.
For one thing, the author is confusing physical pitches with musical notes. C double-sharp exists and is enharmonic to D, for example, because the frequencies are the same. But these are very different notes in a musical context.
There are many examples of this in the article that would be cleared up by a basic understanding of music theory that all music students complete, many of whom do this in piano lessons growing up long before graduating from highschool.
I admire the effort, but I often see people analyze music from a perspective that is not actually that of a musician, and there are always huge gaps in the understanding that needn't be there if they sought a basic knowledge of the matter.
Example:
> For some reason I don't totally understand, some have 2 names (e.g. C#=Db, D#=Eb, F#=Gb, A#=Bb).
Fair enough, you don't understand this, so that should be a clue that more knowledge is necessary before making this claim:
> There is also no E#. It just doesn't exist. Get used to it. Those are the 12 notes.
Incidentally, it goes much further than this, and for good reasons. F is the same pitch as E# and G-double-flat, but all three are distinct musical notes which serve different purposes.
There's also C-flat, B, A-double-sharp.
And B#, C, D-double-flat, etc.
Second, I don't know if this is an artifact of my fluidsynth setup or not, but when I translate his midi files into WAV files the 6 and 7 chords are from the octave below, which sounds odd to my ears. If we're listening to, say, 1.5.6.4 we shouldn't drop down an octave at the 6.
It's probably a bug in my script. How do I know which octave to choose?
If you can explain it to me using the Parsons Code method, I think it's easier for me to understand. 1.5.6.4 is udud, right?
My ears aren't trained enough to know if what I'm hearing is an inversion where you're playing the A note in Amin from the same octave as Cmaj but you're also playing the C and E notes from the same octave, or the A note itself is lower in pitch than the C. I would have expected to hear an Amin chord where the A note was a whole step above the G in Cmaj, and the C and E both higher than the A note.
You could make the case that there are 12 keys, or some multiple of 12 keys, or near-infinite keys. But 30? Pretty random!
I could be wrong - I just guessed that from another data source (some PDF song sheets that have the key listed on the top right).
Yeah, every 4-chord repeating song.
Today I learned playing literally any brass instrument means I'm not actually a musician. Who knew that my knowledge of the trombone ain't actually musicianship? ;)
Otherwise a great article.
If you mean "map your notes so that you can only play the 7 diatonic notes of your major scale", well, then sure it's impossible to play "wrong notes", but it's also impossible to modulate to different keys, to play secondary dominants, any modal mixture, to add chromaticism, etc.
Similarly, as I understand it one of the advantages of equal temperament is that it allows you to modulate to any key within the same song. Of course if you never modulate you should just use just intonation in your key.
Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NlI4No3s0M
Ever played on a top end concert grand and thinking it sounds weird? Then tried a different tuning and being shocked how much better it sounded?
I am not sure what you are saying. What tuning system are you claiming composers like Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Shostakovich wrote keyboard music for, that playing their works in modern 12-tone equal temperament would "shock" them?
"There is a misconception that Bach supported equal temperament because of his famous 1722 collection, Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well Tempered Clavier). Bach's clavichord was not equally tempered, but well tempered, like the title of the work says. The 48 pieces, two in each major and minor key, were written to show the character of each key in this temperament, the effect being completely lost in equal temperament. One can experience this by tuning a keyboard to well temperament, and then transposing Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C-major to C#-major, and vice-versa. The results will clearly show what the master was up to, and that the pieces were written for the nuances of each key with its particular coloring. Bach's theoretical framework was for pure intonation, and his music was written to be played in pure intonation, either by altering the tuning of the keyboard for each piece, or by using a flexible temperament that allowed pure tones in most popular keys."
"Equal temperament, a tuning which disfigures the natural intervals of the harmonic series, was invented as a necessity to the mechanical and engineering limitations of Middle Age instrument builders. But now we are in the 22nd Century and we can accurately measure the 1000th part of a millimeter. So why don't we use this technology to create in-tune musical instruments?"
I strongly recommend to read that discussion, it has both pros and cons of equal temperament and people are discussing the issue from both sides.
Equal temperament is very recent. Medieval through Baroque used a system of temperaments called meantone that began with C major being in tune, and then distorted tones slightly in order to make the proximal keys usable. Choosing a key in meantone implies a real difference in what the relative distance among notes was. When you go out beyond three sharps, it becomes very distorted. Five sharps is essentially unusable in meantone systems.
Bach's well tempering was a replacement for meantone where all the keys were usable. We don't know exactly what it was, though there have been some interesting attempts at reconstructing it. I remember being in the orchestra for the Bach four harpsichord concerto as a demonstration of one such attempt, which was wild.
As for using technology to create in-tune musical instruments, the original one, the voice, already has that. For keyboard instruments, there have been all kinds of crazy ones built over the centuries that have many more notes to an octave to allow much more precise intonation. But that's not the core restriction. I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the pitch a given note maps to changes during a piece of music if you don't have tempered instruments involved, and those changes are always compromises.
So I wouldn't suggest reading that discussion, as it's apparently full of inaccurate material.