Screenshot 1. The Tonal Vision is built on a MIDI display that looks similar to a standard MIDI sequencer or player program in the "Piano Roll" display. However, though the program will play a midi file, or loop through a section of a midi file, it is mainly intended to be used to explore music by having the user guide his mouse-pointer "interactively" through the music (all notes in score or individual notes, as desired). To support further understanding of the music, the program's middle-panel piano roll overlays all notes independent of octave, and also highlights the bass note with a hatch pattern. This supports easy chordal/harmony examination. (In the screenshot, the chords are I-root position, I64, I root position, V7, etc.) I have also tried to add aural and visual items designed to enable the user to listen to the sound of the music with key/tonal context in mind, including making easily available the key reference tones (tonic, cadence, chords, scales, etc). Further, using the built-in interface to my (free) Spectratune software, the user can overlay the detected pitch from the user singing or humming along with the MIDI file. (In the screenshot, which is for a piece of well-known folk-pop from the 1960s, the key is F major, the melody track is shown in yellow, the pitch overlay of my humming along -- inputted to the Spectratune using my webcam mic as a second sound card, is that little bent mark on the A (one octave below the melody) in both piano rolls, attached to the left of the red current position indicator. I also show the Spectratune exactly as it was running, set to show both single-pitch and spectrum of the singer only. (Although it could easily show also the spectrum of the MIDI file in a different color.) The thing on the bottom is some key-determination guidance, for when key is unclear and/or changing. (See the 3rd screenshot for an explanation.)

Screenshot 2. A person is singing the fifth, the root of the cadence V chord, while hearing it. They are a little low of center on that note.) See "EXPLANATION/INSTRUCTIONS" below for detailed explanation.

Screenshot 3. Showing new (3/08) Key-helper plots (the reddish item in the bottom section). The music in view is the start of Bach's Well-Tempered-Klavier book 1 D major. The first half of the section of music shown is clearly in the key of D major, based on the key-helper, and looking also at the consistency of the chord-pattern with D major.

The software, along with the companion Spectratune, was written initially for me (Norm Spier
) and my own miscellaneous personal musical-perception / music-analysis needs.

It is oriented towards the Piano Roll representation of music, as opposed to the standard staff representation. By doing this, I am trying to make tonal and harmonic happenings more directly visible than in staff representation. (Undoubtedly, people with advanced musical training and/or gifts to the level of thorough music-notation fluency have developed the ability to perceive these happenings in a flash from the score, practically sub-consciously. This software is aimed primarily at those without that skill, especially those of us who love to listen to music, and want to understand the music we listen to with some depth. Thus, the software is designed mainly for people who know basic music theory, and thus know the rules of how a score represents notes, but have not attained mental immediacy in the conversion of those score notes to sounds, chords, etc. )

Besides the music-analysis applications, my hope is that for non-musically-trained/gifted folks, my pair of programs will give them a tool to improve sense of tone and tonality by immersing them in various forms of visual feedback.

Frankly, I'm hoping the pair of programs can somewhat repair, when used over time in older (post-childhood) people, lack of skilled aural musical guidance in the environment during early childhood. This guidance would be regarding sense of harmony, scales, pitch-match, tonality, position in key, etc. Based on my experience so far, my belief is that it does do this, slowly, with repeated use across the various possible configurations (sing harmony against MIDI, sing melody against MIDI, scales, listen to MIDI and analyze, hum against CD, etc.). Of course, this is much slower and less perfect learning than that in early childhood, as the critical period has indeed been missed.


EXPLANATION/INSTRUCTIONS

TONAL VISION OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS

VIDEO 1: EXAMPLE OF USING THE SOFTARE FOR BASIC EAR-TRAINING Position In Key.

(The two windows on the left third of the screen in the clip are associated with my separate Spectratune software. It's in this video mostly because I like to show it off. So, mainly look at the bigger window on the right.)

In the clip, the user is interested in developing the ability to immediately hear position in key whenever listening to a major-key melody. In this case, he has chosen a popular tune (fragment made use of here under fair use). (Aside: The MIDI file used happened to have the correct key coded into it, so the correct tonal guidance came up automatically before I started shooting the video clip. The user has told the software to transpose up by two half steps from what's in the MIDI file, as part of varying the exercise each time, that is, so he doesn't always get the tune in the same key. When the tune was transposed, the tonal guidance was transposed automatically with it by the software.)

Since the user is interested, in this exercise, not in chords, but in position of the melody within key, all tracks but the melody are turned off. The user starts getting oriented by generating a tonic chord (done through my left mouse click rules), and singing the tonic. (You can not hear the user sing the tonic, because I'm not feeding that through my sound card. But I do happen to be capturing it in my web-cam mic's sound circuitry, and feeding it into channel 2 of my Spectratune, where the pitch shows up on the yellow arrow of the Spectratune. The user, who has imperfect pitch-matching, is using it for a bit tonal guidance. NOTE: the video was made before I made the pitch-guidance appear directly on the Tonal Vision.)

After getting the tonic in the head, the user is closing eyes, sliding to the next note, listening and deciding what he thinks the note is (i.e. tonic, dominant, etc, or else in movable-do solfege: do, so, fa, fi, la, etc.), then opening eyes for positive or negative reinforcement. (To keep himself from seeing the answer before the note is sounded, the user has "Mask NP" ="mask not-playing" checked.) At the end of the fragment of the tune of interest, the user plays the music fragment in loop mode, at slightly reduced from normal speed.


VIDEO 2: MONKEYING AROUND TRYING TO COME UP WITH MUSIC-THEORETICAL/PSYCHOACOUSTICAL IDEAS (COMBINED WITH THE SPECTRATUNE) Click Here For Video. (Green spectrogram is the Tonal Vision output.) Note occasional humming of test tones is going on into the web-cam mike (not heard on the video). The humming is the blue spectrogram, with its single pitch also showing up as the red arrow on the Spectratune. The single pitch is being carried back to the Tonal Vision, and shows up as that little bent mark there. (The Spectratune here is responding slowly, because it is doing 3 analysis tasks at once, and also, the adjustments are a little inoptimal.)

VIDEO 3: MONKEYING AROUND WITH CHORDS (COMBINED WITH THE SPECTRATUNE) Click Here For Video. We get quicker Spectratune response because it is only doing one analysis task, and we have set better adjustments.

Questions:

norm@nastechservices.com,


MY OTHER MUSIC SITES

MUSIC-PERCEPTION TOOLKIT ITEM # 1: Spectratune: Your own musical spectral display (it's free!).

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Pre-Made Spiral Music Spectrogram Videos.

ToneGen. A modest little tone generator allowing continous pitch variation for intonation perception exercises. You can also use it to test your musical friends and see just how fine-grain their pitch perception is.





SIGNIFICANT RELATED SITE OF INTEREST

Stephen Malinowski's Music Animation Machine does some piano-roll displays, and other interesting displays related to tonality and musical pattern, using, like my own software, MIDI files. Stephen has been doing some of these widely respected displays for years, initially on videotape, and I first bumped into them playing over the Classic Arts Showcase network. The current software is quite recent, free, and worked perfectly first time for me.

ALSO:
Daniel Sleator and David Temperley's Melisma Music Analyzer. This is LINUX-only software which does a text-form analyis of music-theory-form chords and a few other items. Note that if you hit a problem with the Melisma software converting MIDI files to the needed Melisma input format, Tonal Vision will do it (from Windows).

GET CLASSICAL MUSIC MIDI FILES AT:
Classical Music Archives. This site offers up to 5 downloads a day for free, and you can get a much larger allocation of downloads for only $25. a year.

<OTHER SOURCES OF MIDI FILES FOR ALL TYPES OF MUSIC:

If you search any major search engine for the title you are looking for, with "MIDI", you usually come up with a few midi files. Note that typically classical and traditional folk music are not copyrighted.
Popular and later music may be copyrighted, and free midi files of these may in some cases be a violation of intellectual property rights, though the MIDI files will still be abundant. However, in this case, you may be able to legally and/or ethically resolve this issue by purchasing the sheet music or a CD of the music you have on MIDI.



IF YOU ARE INTERESTED INTERESTED IN COMPUTER APPROACHES TO MUSIC ANALYSIS AND MUSIC PERCEPTION:

There are a fair number of academics across several disciplines, scattered all over the world, working on this. See the Journal "Music Perception", and in your university library electronic journal search tools and/or at Amazon, search for the names Carol Kruhmansl and David Temperley. Then go from there.

NOTE: I may, over time, extend this software to include various of the algorithms, and my own versions.

About me, Norm Spier: I am a free-lance mathematical statistician and computer programmer, living near Binghamton, New York, U.S.

SUPPORT TONAL ANALYSIS AND RELATED ACOUSTICAL PROJECTS: DONATIONS

I have, have built up my aural perception from, and recommend, EarMaster ear training software. These links, through Amazon, seem to be for the same product that I have: EarMaster 5. The prices are different: one through Amazon direct, one through a sub-vendor.

Schonbrun is elementary, geared towards all types of music. It is an introduction. It doesn't go into great depth.

Henry is geared towards both classical and popular/folk, with a middle-level of detail. It is a general theory book. I'd probably recommend it as a first book for someone who has already developed a listening ear to classical music. (Note it has a 2nd volume, with the 2nd volume covering musical forms and being needed for a complete grounding.)

Kostka/Payne is a common harmony book used in college courses these days. It has a clarity and simplicity that is nice. It is a bit pricey new, so you may want to try to find a used copy on Amazon or Abebooks or Alibris.

Schoenberg is a classic, at points articulate. At other points (e.g. definition of secondary dominant), it is quite baffling. It has considerable reference to overtones as explanations for the rules of harmony, but some of these may be speculative. It is probably not a good first book to read on harmony. Beginners note also that it is harmony only, leaving out melody and other aspects of music theory, and therefore unsuitable to them.

Piston is also a classic, geared toward classical music, with numerous examples from classical music. It is harmony only, so not suitable to beginners in music theory.

In all cases, if you lack musical experience as a child or in college, you may find the concepts hard to get. Things may not sink in on first reading, and you may ultimately need more than one book. This is partially because music theorists seem to be a little right-brained for people called "theorists". Further, there are substantially different emphases, and ways of explaining things, in different books. Not to mention a certain amount of psychoacoustic speculation.


Here is a free public-domain (due to age) harmony book on Google Books:.
Dirk Hagmaans's Harmony (1916)

Here is another one: Chadwick's Harmony

Another one: Foote & Spalding Harmony

Another one: Carolyn Alchin Applied Harmony with Examples from the Literature

Yet Another one: Shepard Harmony Simplified (Systematic)

Yet Another one: Anger Harmony

Another : Robinson Aural Harmony

Another : McCoy Cumulative Harmony