Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

I found it a bit weird to "normalize" everything back to C. Couldn't just use numbers instead? (To make it friendlier for those less comfortable with that, put a hover over to show what that means in each key at each point in your analysis.)

Good call on the guitar tab sites being wrong almost all the time!

View on HN

I think the reason to not use roman numerals is because what Roman numeral would you use for B major. B diminished is IV, but B major is not in the C scale, neither is B minor or B augmented, or B sus2 or Bsus4. It makes sense to write it all normalized to the key of C because songs may borrow chords from other keys in similar ways

You use uppercase Roman numerals to indicate a major chord. So it is then easy to distinguish between vii⁰ and VII and is the standard way in music theory.

The author probably wasn't familiar with how it is normally done with roman numerals

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

This is obviously not true. They use Roman numerals in the article and in follow-on articles

...or at least normalize to G like god and Earl intended :-)

One thing that wasn't clear to me: Would a song in A minor have the A minor transposed to C minor? Seems like they gloss over the mood.

That would only work for songs that always stay in key, many don't. Normalizing to C is a better approach.

The numbers in Roman numeral analysis are relative to the current key of the song. It works fine for songs that modulate.

Assuming they remain diatonic, much music doesn't.

Why do you need that assumption? I think Roman numerals allow for non-diatonic chords like a i diminished.

Roman numerals still presume you're playing on a harmonized scale in a key; not all music fits that as many rock musicians don't know what a key is and pick chords randomly by sound, not by knowing anything about music theory.

The parent to this comment said

> It works fine for songs that modulate.

By definition, modulation is the act of not remaining diatonic. Modulation = changing keys. Diatonic = staying within key.

So, no, we don't need to assume anything about diatonicity in order to successfully do harmonic analysis using Roman numerals.

I always thought of diatonic as playing within a harmonized major/minor scale, even if you change keys. What I'm talking about is music that doesn't obey the rules at all, doesn't have a key, doesn't change keys, it's just random chords thrown together because the artist thought they sounded good. Changing to another key is still playing in a key. Many rock musicians wouldn't know a key if it bit them in the ass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com