A while back I blogged about music theory for geeks and got a lot of feedback from my fellow musicians (some geek some not). Then I blogged for over a month about a new technology named Dojo Toolkit, which essentially is a JavaScript toolkit to create really cool looking AJAX/Web 2.0 applications. As a pet project I developed an elementary music application which shows the notes that constitute a specific key and scale/chord combination. I frankly didn’t intend to make anything out of this application and it was a simple example to experiment with certain Dojo features.
Turns out there are many geeks out there who were looking for something like this and I started to get requests for new features and bug fixes. More interestingly I started to use it myself in music projects. So I decided to take my simple Musician’s Helper application and promote it to its own web page, fix up a number obvious issues and make it available to anyone who is willing to use it. Now an enhanced version of Musician’s Helper is available at:
As you might have noticed, I changed the name from “Musician’s Helper” to “music.isallicare.com”, because I already owned this domain and it made sense to recycle it rather than inventing another name. After all I registered this domain name to keep track of things I care about, and music is no exception.
I want to go over the application a bit today and give you an overview of its features, information about how you can get started to use it and what you might expect in the future in terms of new functionality. If you have been following my earlier blogs about music theory, most musical theory concepts can be modeled with the simple set theory, because there are essentially twelve notes and all scales and chords can be defined as a subset of these 12 notes. Music.isallicare.com is a tool that performs these calculations and shows the user the notes that make up a chord or a scale in a number of different views.
Currently the application supports a “Notation View” and a “Table View”, in which the notes that belong to a scale or chord are shown for a specific key. When you first load the application, the initial key is set to “C” and the scale/chord is set to a “Major Scale” (see Figure below, and feel free to click on it to visit the web site).
Music.IsAllICare.com initial page screenshot
The above screenshot is from a “Notation View”, with which most musicians are probably are familiar with. If you click on the tab that says “Table View”, you’ll see the same scale in a Table View as shown below. This view, which I kind of invented, is nothing more than a linear version of a common degrees circle. It shows the degrees on top and corresponding notes at the bottom. The notes of the scale or chord are highlighted with blue. As you can see, the C Major Scale is composed of C,D,E,F,G,A and B.
Screen Shot for Table View
Now let’s change the key, or in proper music lingo, let’s transpose to another key. You can transpose to another key, say to F, by simply clicking on the F on the left panel, or by choosing the “Transpose Menu” and clicking on F.
Transposing the Key
After you click on F, the notes on both Views are updated to reflect the changes. The F Major Scale is composed of F, G, A, Bb (B flat), C and D.
F Major Scale
You obviously can repeat the same for any of the available 12 keys to immediately see which notes belong to your major scale.
The other important feature of the application is to show different scales or chords. If you click on the accordion panel on the left side of the screen titled “Scales”, it will show you a list of most commonly used scales. Currently the application supports the following 8 scales:
As in the case of the keys, simply click on the scale you want to select and all views and titles will be updated dynamically. For example, to see which notes are in the F Diminished Scale, simply click on “Diminished Scale” link on the left.
F Diminished Scale (Table View)
The F Diminished Scale has the notes F, G, Ab, Bb, B, Db, D and E. Needless to say you can view the Notation View by clicking on the appropriate tab as well.
F Diminished Scale (Notation View)
The Chords Tab on the Left Panel works pretty much the same way the Scales Tab does. I included most of the commonly used Chords and all you have to do to see the notes contained in that chord is just to click on it.
Now that we covered the basics, I like to go over a couple of other features, you might want to have a look. One of them is the Link to this page feature. On any key scale/chord combination you can click this button to generate an HTML code that links directly to the page you are currently viewing. This might come in handy while you are blogging and need to refer to a Chord or a Scale.
Link to this page Feature
Another new feature is the Alternate Names for Chords. There are a large number of names and/or symbols associated with different chords (which sometimes gets quite confusing), and now the application gives a list of commonly used alternate names and symbols, where they are available.
Alternate Chord Names
Before I conclude today’s Blog, I like to list some of the possible future feature enhancements and known issues. If you have other features in mind, have software bugs or content inaccuracies to report, please drop me a line and I’ll try to fix them.
- A Piano View
- A Guitar Keyboard View
- A Bass Keyboard View
- Allow the use of sharps as well as flats
- Use natural sign after a flat sign on the Notation View
- Add modal scales
In the distant future
- Allow to upload Lead Sheets and the ability to transpose them
- Include common progressions and the ability to transpose them
- Show chord inversions
The design for your site is a bit off in Opera. However I like your web site. I may have to install a “normal” browser just to enjoy it.
Hi! This is really cool, and I hope you’ll also go back to the “music theory for geeks” blog series — you suggested that you would post about a whole bunch of topics that I’m curious about. What I’d really also like to understand is what the underpinnings of these musical conventions are. What is the relationship of a chord, a scale, and a key, in “geek terms”? (I take it a chord is a subset of a scale, but by what operation is the chord derived from the scale?) Similarly — let’s say I whistle a melodic line; i.e. a sequence of single notes. A musician will say “oh, that’s in this key” — and, if she has a guitar in hand, will strum along appropriate chords. What operation produces this assignment of a sequence of notes to a key or chord progression? In geek terms, a note is a number in the set of 12, a scale and a chord are both two sets of numbers — so I’m whistling [1, 3, 4, 3, 5, 5, 3, 9] and my musician friend says “that is in [1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12], I will strum [1, 3, 5, 7] to accompany it.” Why? I’m hoping there is a geekier, more algorithmic answer than the intuitive musician’s answer of “’cause it sounds good”