Color-Coded Harmony: Learning Western Music Through 100 Popular Pieces

The article launches a color-based piano-roll system for learning harmony across 100 popular pieces. It introduces the 12-note set, interactive keyboard layouts, and the construction of diatonic triads in major scales. “Happy Birthday” demonstrates how simple chord accompaniment supports melody, setting the stage for deeper exploration.

Key Points

• Music is analyzed using a tonic-centered, color-coded piano-roll notation that makes chords and structures visually obvious.
• Readers need no standard notation; instead, they can use provided keyboard layouts to experiment with all 12 chromatic notes.
• Major-scale harmony is introduced by building diatonic triads via stacked thirds, covering all seven scale-degree chords.
• Western music is framed as melody plus chords, with chords functioning as the basic ‘words’ of its language.
• “Happy Birthday” serves as a starter example, using three simple diatonic chords to support the melody and demonstrate the method.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment of the Hacker News discussion is largely positive, with users expressing enthusiasm and finding the visual approach to harmony "very cool." There is one constructive suggestion for improving the color palette's musical correlation.

In Agreement

• Commenters found the detailed breakdown and the overall concept "very cool" and inspiring for further experimentation with chords, progressions, and melodies.
• The method is recognized for making chord progressions memorizable and instantly visible, bypassing the need for traditional Roman numeral analysis.

Opposed

• One user suggested that the visualization could be improved by choosing a better color palette where the relationship between colors reflects musical distances, such as on the circle of fifths, rather than just using different colors for different notes.