Show HN: Warp, a Python based music-theory aware MIDI sequencer

Not if you're moving from one kind of scale to another, as you've said you can.

6 7 8 are functionally different to 1 2 etc in an eight-step key.

In fact they're different across different 8 step keys. 6 7 8 in Phrygian are structurally different compared to 6 7 8 in Minor, even though they're the same pitches.

Chords and melodies that use them do not have the same shapes - not because of accidentals, but because they're fundamentally not the same thing and they move through the scale space in different ways.

And in harmonic minor 6 7 8 ascending and descending are different - not just made different with accidentals, but contextually different.

Meanwhile pentatonic melodies can have a pentatonic harmony, or they can have harmonies in other scales and modes. How do you know what "4" is supposed to mean if you're not aware of this?

Of course you can trivially map Thing to Other Thing in Python, but if you don't understand these relationships you're destroying the musical meaning. This is fine for vaguely ambient noodling, but not for building a genuine theory-aware sequencer.

In music theory you don't just play with numbers, you play with style conventions, context, and meaning - and solving that is a much harder problem than you've managed here.

Not sure if that is exactly the answer, but frustration with sheet music is kind of why guitar tab also exists... except I don't play guitar.

The Roman numeral analysis is somewhat related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System

If you really want to read things faster than key signatures, there are a bunch of music books you can buy where everything is transcribed to C.

Anyway, that's kind of all the point of just typing in the scale degrees in Warp... not having to worry about what notes are in what scale, and being able to quickly "draw" out the pattern, which is problematic in most DAWs.

Hey there, I'm currently writing an alternative to music theory that is informed by my own self-taught composing. In the western system the 7 note system is used because of the diatonic scale (you may have heard it as the "Major scale", this is usually an inaccurate term and half the time "diatonic scale" is correct). This 7-note system is relied on for almost all the terminology in western theory, which means there is a lot of fudging to make the notes fit, as the diatonic scale is not actually equally spaced apart. That's the reason there is a "minor" and "major" third and not just one "third".

In addition all these terms are one-indexed because zero was not invented yet, so "unison" in western theory, which refers to two of the same note being played, gets the number 1 (uni-). The same goes for the minor/major second, and so on. This is what causes all the terrible addition problems.

The diatonic scale's strong relevance in music theory is not completely unjustified because almost all consonant (or "good sounding") music is made in it, but it's not very helpful to have to deconvert these terms to any other scale.

I visualize all scales as 12-note equally spaced scales and strongly recommend anyone else to do the same. It's known as the chromatic scale. In this system a unison is just 0, a minor second is 1, major second is 2... and so on. You'll see this system used in "music set theory" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_(music)#Generic_and_s... - look at the semitone number to see the amount of equally-spaced spaces between the notes. Although, the word "semitone" is also a poorly thought out choice due to the diatonic scale (it implies a base unit of "2" instead of "1" since semitone corresponds to 1). Music set theory terminology is much better than western theory IMO, but I think a lot of music set theory buys into too many mathematics-based hypotheses (when it tries to draw equivocations between scales), so I find it has its own issues.