I sometimes disappear down a rabbit hole, and this one was deep. I wrote a program that generates a map of tonal harmony as I see it in my mind when I do free improvisation in a key, as on my album Inventions / Reinventions. Come for the pretty colors, stay for the nerdy explanations of secondary dominants. I coded all this from scratch, including the surface forming the landscape and its ripples, the diatonic chord spellings, the hierarchical positioning of the chords in space, the voice-leading in the chord player, the way the camera selects chords… These programming journeys can become all-consuming for me. Glad I got this one out of me.
(Originally posted as part of #100daysofpractice 2023)
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Absolutely brilliant. I have been longing for someone to code this. I was even considering learning coding to figure out a way to bring about visual harmonic fields. Maybe that could be the name for those green hill looking things.
Any way, Bravo! Fucking genius mate!
This is an excellent explanation and analogy. Thanks for posting! I wonder if there would be a way for the relative minor key to exist underneath the tonic key or some sort
that’s a nice idea!