Making the most of viewing a trace of a song analysed in harmony space
To complement a harmonic analysis, it can be useful to play back the animated visual recording of the chord sequence in the ‘curated songs’ section (if there is a recording/analysis for that song). Note that by contrast automatic analyses using the “songs from the web” panel cannot in general be relied on for accuracy - see below for details.
This section summarises basic tips for playback. (By contrast, to understand how to create your own analyses, and the analytic rationale, see here).
Playback of any chord sequence from the ‘Curated Songs’ section can provide a lot of information about harmonic structure visually. A good way to start to make sense of all this is probably to read the analysis in words of several songs first.
Harmonic information is embodied in:
the spatial path of the chord sequence (as made visible using the live arrows or arrow recap buttons)
on-screen annotations of the trace
physical movements of the key window (made visible in the separate mode arrow trace)
changes in the mode (made visible by movements in the position of the red ring relative within the key window)
changes in the extended mode (made visible by on-screen mode annotations)
the 3-D shape of each chord relative to the key window position
To focus visually just on the root path, use the trace root button – to watch moment by moment chord qualities, unselect both trace root and trace all buttons. The root path alone compresses a surprising amount of information, because unless the root is annotated with a label for its chord quality, the chord quality will just be the natural chord quality (i.e thirds-stacked diatonic quality) for that, position in the key window. Using the “water filling metaphor” described here, it is not hard to learn how to read these off visually (along with an array of associated harmonic realtionships) visually.
On completion of playback (but not before) you can use Print Chords to see a conventional functional harmonic analysis (in alphabetic or roman notation).
Harmonic analyses are always provisional – interpretations can vary
By contrast with songs in the curated songs section, pieces in the chords from the web section have not been actively analysed harmonically. The chords sequences collected from online databases are not always accurate, and the notation of keys and modes found there can also be of variable quality. The spatial traces used to display pieces in this section are generated heuristically only, and may not reflect musical insights well. However, harmony space makes it relatively easy to identify errors in key and mode attribution visually, and to find the right key and mode visually by trial and error. The editor for the chords from the web section can be used to make corrections and resubmit the corrected version to the Choco database (resubmission system is currently in beta testing).