Comment by williamdclt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by williamdclt | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting, I'll definitely play with it for a bit! I came across this concept of "lattice" about a year ago too, with this beautiful song using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA1C9VFqJKo

A couple of comments: - Why select notes by right-clicking rather than left-clicking? - When building a chord, it shows the name on top and the scale degree below. But it's the opposite when I drag it to the chord progression zone, it confused me - Might be worth it to add a few tooltips or links for help (eg explaining what's a "parallel progression") - I don't understand why notes are more or less red - It'd be useful to show the scale degree of each note in the lattice (in addition to the note itself and its octave)

Thanks for your helpful feedback! I believe that lattice in the video is a Tonnetz. The Harmonic table and the Tonnetz are topologically equivalent, actually. I had doubts about the right-click being the best option to select notes. I thought a new user would left-click on the harmonic table initially, before reading anything, and I wanted that to just produce a sound rather than making an unwanted selection. But it's something I'm willing to change if more people finds it strange. I think you're right about the label order thing in chord buttons. I guess I found the Roman numerals more relevant in the progression context, but I agree it can be confusing. There's a help page (/how-to-use.html) with instructions and explanations of some concepts like parallel progression, but maybe a few tooltips can be helpful. Notes that have a lighter color are those that belong to the currently selected scale, to ease identification. At the same time, notes are slightly darker as they get lower in pitch. I like your idea about adding the scale degree label to notes. You mean something like 1, b2, 2, b3, 3, etc.? I'd have to make sure it doesn't get confused with octaves, though. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

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