- Author
- Posted by vitaly-pavlenko, with replies from many commenters
- Published
- 5 November 2025
- Kind
- Hacker News discussion thread about a colored piano-roll notation tool
- Original
- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826472
- Subject
- Consonance and tuning
- Themes
- Saying it exactly
What it is
The thread is on rawl.rocks, a site with about 3000 popular MuseScore pieces. They appear in a colored piano-roll notation. The poster is its creator. The thread had 129 points when collected. Commenters include musicians, programmers and one self-described jazz trombonist.
What it says
- The poster says each chord shows as a flag of three to four colors.
- The poster says the tonic is always white, so each MIDI file needs manual annotation.
- The poster says colors run in thirds, with tonic and fifth shown in grayscale.
- The poster says Hooktheory-style tools rely on a reduction that someone must make first.
- Commenter CGMthrowaway argues that a colored piano roll loses most sheet music information.
- The poster replies that two years of jazz training gave no fluency in seeing harmony.
- Commenter recursive says colors follow scale degrees, so a V-I cadence matches in every key.
What evidence it gives
The thread offers the poster's design reasoning and links to a corpus and lectures. Commenters give opinions and two bug reports, a Safari crash and a lagging playback marker. No test with learners is reported.
Interests and limits
The poster built the tool and has an interest in its adoption. The Rawl site, its code and the Russian lectures were not opened for this page. The poster says the tool is useless to color-blind people. No comparison with learning from sheet music is offered.