Comment by kazinator
5 days ago
> This simplifies visual analysis: chords like [uncopyable image of color bars] and other structures become visible, scores become readable and interpretable.
The colors are hard-coded to pitches, and so change upon transpositions. For instance a V-I cadence in different keys is functionally the same, but will be colored differently.
It does help highlight common tones between nearby chords.
Other than that, it's not doing anything for me in terms of seeing function.
No, they're not. They're coded to scale degrees. V-I cadence will be the same color in all keys and inversions.
OK, so it tracks key changes? How about secondary dominants: V-I cadences targeting any scale degree at any time.
I might be using the terminology wrong, but I wouldn't call a I-IV resolution V-I, even though it's the same relative movement. Nor would I call it a key change. I would say downward movement of a fifth is common in western music, but the feel is different for different resolution targets. To me, it seems more clear or explanatory to keep the colors encoded as scale degrees of the current key, not the local cadence-resolution-target or whatnot.
In all cases of tonicization I decided whether to notate a brief tonic change or not (piece by piece, case by case): https://rawl.rocks/s/applied/chain_of_dominants
You can always manually "probe", minutely "recolor": click on a measure number and hover a potential new tonic.
1 reply →