How musecore motivated me to read about harmony

[jimishol]

As a retiree, I decided, this time last year, to solve a decades-old question. How musicians instantly recognize musical keys. Fortunately, I didn't recognize, until today, that my musical clock pretty much refers to the bottom of the wikipedia page, because I wouldn't have continued. Realizing how easy it was to find that seven sharps corresponded to C# major, simply because 'seven seven forty-nine', I started reading harmony, just in case my clock had further utility. I wrote two trivial articles on musical intervals and church modes where it might prove useful.

Reading harmony I was tempted to download musescore and do some exercises with it. The results were so good that I remembered an attempt to compose something thirty to forty years ago when I was playing classical guitar. I started harmonizing at the same time as studying harmony. The process was painstaking, since I was finding, say, a sixth with my fingers, counting A-C-E-F at best. But I was so proud of the result that I posted my composition.

Unfortunately, the composition moves only me and my brother, perhaps because it has an autobiographical character. It doesn't seem to move anyone that the simple application of harmonic prohibitions or rules had such an effect. I wondered whether performance by real instruments might give it some extra quality and, if so, how a recording can be achieved. This is the question I wanted to ask, but contact information for composers is hidden to avoid nuisances like this one.

When I finished what I was reading, I decided to read two books by Schoenberg. It has taken me the last six or seven months to read them, mostly with mathematical intuition rather than musical knowledge or skill. When I finished them, I understood that what I thought I had understood would be forgotten in the next six months, since I don't do music, except as an avid classical music listener. I began the systematic recording of my thoughts on harmony and, from this process, without expecting it, the placement of the twelve tones on a mathematical three-dimensional surface emerged, creating images of harmonic progressions that I could 'see', since I was unable to 'hear' anyway. I have just finished publishing the article in Greek and translating it into English.

One question I want to ask is about my unique composition and it is in bold above.

In order to pique your interest in the composition, let me mention that the style I would like to achieve is: Satie to help with Gnossienne 1 in the grace notes of the 1st movement, Ravel with the bolero in a revolutionary 2nd movement, Bach with a fugue in the bittersweet 3rd movement (I confused countersubject with answer but it came out better that way), with the three short and the one long note, of the 5th, Beethoven to help climax the middle section, with the Funeral March Chopin lamenting with me at the end along with a Byzantine equal temperament (pedal note) that lands in the inevitable, in 'that's the way things are'. As my brother pointed out to me, and he's right, with Roads of Fire Vangelis Papathanasiou came completely uninvited.

In addition, if, as I believe, the linkage of the relationships of the twelve tones with a three-dimensional object has not yet been found, the structure I describe in my article may prove to be a very useful descriptive tool for teaching harmony, if not a very beautiful decorative musical-mathematical object.

I found it very difficult trying to edit the mscx files to create plugins.

So, one idea for a plugin is to do what I did in figure 6 of my article, which is purely a matter of computing the result of the G() function.

Another idea is to create a music visualizer, where flashes of the frequencies being played are shown with possible distinction between obvious and hidden tonality when the latter is involved.

Another idea is the construction, with the help of a computer-aided modeling, of the musical-mathematical object with transparent material. It is a three-dimensional object and I believe that everyone would like to literally play the harmony of the 12 tone equal temperament system on their fingers.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)