LILYPOND TIES AND CHORDS GENERATOR

Let say that I want to play around with a very specific note cluster I found or with a very unlabelled chord I like. While working with 'raw' chords has its own set of advantages, writing bespoke chords is also incredibely valuable for algorithmic music. the voicings of McCoy Tyner on this very famous record, the voicings of Debussy, etc.). Every music genre have its own kind of 'best practices' for doing so, and there is always the fact that 'voicing' chords in your own way is a part of developing a personal style (e.g. Voice-leading is not about writing every note by hand, but a bunch of techniques used to write the smoothest possible transitions from chord A to chord B. This is a very difficult question to answer because I don't think that there is a simple answer. Sorry for the long message, I find this subject very pleasing to discuss as it unravels a lot of things both important for music theory and computer representation of things, ahahaha. It is now just a matter of text-as-interface or end-user representation of musical things. You can already talk about notes as single entities (hello c3). It is almost a Counterpoint-Ready Machine (think about retrograde, arithmetic transposition, speeding up or down, etc.). However, I guess that the door should stay open for a computer language that can speak about voice leading and horizontal thinking of music.

Sometimes, these scales or ready-made chords are also cool to explore harmony as a 'timbre generator'. It is absolutely necessary for making techno or rave music.

It is part of the sound of electronic music as a genre and that's great ( Laurie Spiegel - The Expanding Universe || Kraftwerk - Das Model). The trend of exploring microtonality is also very often a matter of exploring even more scales and rigid structures.Ī lot of Tidal users, including myself, are now in love with these harmonic textures that consist in ramping up and down a scale, superposing them, arpegiators and all that stuff.

LILYPOND TIES AND CHORDS GENERATOR

As of today, digital audio workstations regularly get patches and updates adding a scale module, a chord generator module, and so on. I'm thinking about all these wonderful machines like grooveboxes (Korg Electribes and so on) or early user-friendly musical sequencers. I think that it is worse than that because the predictibility and rigidity of chord-scale theory is now engrained in some musical genres because most musical systems from the 1980-2000 era were using them as an easy way to allow the user to harmonize stuff and do music intuitively without thinking about the subtleties of voice-leading. I used to spend a lot of time explaining to students the right and wrong way to move between C, F and G: What's really really missing from chord scale theory – and this is a bigger question than just naming chords – is any sense of voice leading: the horizontal connection between notes in chords. In practice, this is hardly ever the case: typically a 13th chord would appear as one of quite a small number of idiomatic voicings of four or maybe five notes. In the abstract, a dominant 13th chord contains seven different notes. The biggest problem for practical music making I'd say is to do with extended stacks of thirds. There could be some aliases as well, so that something like the very common half-diminished (minor seven flat five) chord is easier to write. I can't find much there that is musically contentious, and it covers the basics well. I'm ashamed to say I stepped away from this conversation once I realised how complex it was!Īs a practical suggestion that leverages existing work, an adaptation of the Lilypond syntax looks good to me.

Lilypond ties and chords