I'm sharing an early prototype of my open-source interactive book and MIDI viewer. My approach is to annotate a tonic and phrasing in each file, so that chords become visible as 3-4 color bundles after a bit of training. This radically simplifies seeing and hearing chords, so that you can rapidly browse through many arrangements and study Western harmonic/arrangement language<p>If you don't have a touchpad, a horizontal scrolling can be done via shift+mouse wheel (generally on the web). Also, I have a second color scheme that I tried to optimized for people with color vision deficiencies.<p>My big dream now is to have all piano rolls in DAWs support 12-coloring (in any color scheme really), so that the music can be seen as less complex, less gatekeeped and less entangled. It's not as hard as I've seen it before.<p>Source code: <a href="https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl">https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl</a><p>It currently doesn't play music from Russia or Türkiye (=requires a VPN), because I rely on corsproxy.io internally which blocks access from those countries. I plan to rehost stuff on S3 soon to fix that.<p>Also, it's more performant in Chrome than in Safari - audio clicks less.<p>===<p>Backstory: I quit Whatsapp in 2021 to focus full-time on studying music theory. Along that I've assembled a list of resources to see the frontier: <a href="https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music">https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music</a><p>My biggest inspiration is Hooktheory - an interactive book that teaches how melody and chords interact in Western pop music. After it I wanted to study how the rest of the arrangement works - what the bass line is doing, how is melody doubled, what chromatic chords are possible, are there any functional pre-dominants and dominants in mixolydian or dorian etc.<p>I wanted to focus on music for which the complete arrangement is clean and available. This is early chiptune (NES/Genesis) OSTs and MIDI arrangements (primarily created in 1990s). As I plugged MIDIs into my front-end, I discovered that the harmonic analysis - the cornerstone of studying Western harmony - can be done by eyes in real-time. That is, if you color the notes consistently, the chords start to stare at you, sharply and memorably.<p>I'm intrigued by latest shifts towards corpus studies in music theory and I'm generally happy that nowadays the research is not just about classical music anymore. At least in the West.