Comment by CGMthrowaway
5 days ago
Why use this piano-roll visualization rather than just color coding notes on sheet music? You lose a lot of other information in the process (like, almost all of it).
5 days ago
Why use this piano-roll visualization rather than just color coding notes on sheet music? You lose a lot of other information in the process (like, almost all of it).
You're very close to Aikin shape note heads! These help sight-read in any key, since they're always shaped according to whatever the relative major is, and so it's easy to learn the intervals between any two shapes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_B._Aikin
Yeah this is basically shape notes with colors, in a MIDI format. Not helpful for non-digital musicians
Fair point.
In my approach I got very dense yet readable information density on the screen. Eg. the entire Mov. 1 of Moonlight sonata is a single screen on my 16" Mac, yet all tonal effects are there, visible: https://rawl.rocks/f/Sonate_No._14_Moonlight_1st_Movement
The first movement. Which is 4 pages long. You could display 2 pages on a 16" screen, so you improved density by 2x but you have no articulation, no dynamics or tempo markings, no legato/phrasing notation, no LH/RH indication.
If you really wanted to show the harmony as densely as possible you could fit the whole movement on 1 page with figured bass and a comment or two about how to play the arpeggios.
I'm not a hater, I encourage the exploration. Just get personally frustrated when we aren't ever building on 1000 years of music notation and instead starting with MIDI and DAW style slop - it's not value-add for serious classically trained artists, and (imo) pushes music dilettantes in the wrong directions
So here I stand with dilettantes :)
Being a jazz college dropout, I stopped building around standard notation when after two years of training - and I started learning piano at 25 - I still didn't get any fluency in instantly seeing harmonic structure in the scores.
I don't care that much about articulation. I can hear articulation anyways. What I care about is the elusive layer of harmony which is so hard to reason about without the right tools.
That's why people do Roman numerals, figured bass, all sorts of annotation: https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music/blob/main/parts/cla...
And that's what I was chasing. Something that gives me, a guy who didn't spent formative years of K-12 by sight-reading at the piano, a way to build mental models of how Western harmony works.
And here, I believe, I'm with the majority of people.
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