![]() I have been drawing scales and chords on the chromatic circle by hand for a long time, and I wanted to be able to produce them automatically. This idea has been in the pipeline for a while, but the impetus to finally push it to completion was my Fundamentals of Western Music class at the New School. These geometric visualizations are meant to support and complement your aural understanding of intervals and chords, the way that they do with rhythms on the Groove Pizza. If you play three or more notes at a time, they will form an orange shape. If you play two notes at a time, they will be connected by an orange line. Finally, orange notes are the ones that are currently being played. Grey notes are outside the selected scale. ![]() Purple notes are neither bright nor dark, i.e. Green notes are “bright”–i.e., major, natural, sharp, or augmented. Blue notes are “dark”–i.e., minor, flat, or diminished. The color scheme on the pitch wheel is intended to give you some visual cues about how each scale is going to sound. In addition to playing the built-in instruments, you can also use the aQWERTYon as a MIDI controller for any DAW or notation program via the IAC bus (Windows users will need to install MidiOX.) Turn the aQWERTYon’s volume to zero if you’re doing this. It visualizes the notes you’re playing on the chromatic circle in real time. Click the image to try it! (Be sure to whitelist it on your ad blocker or it won’t work.) Yesterday, we launched a new version of the app, the Theory aQWERTYon. ![]() The aQWERTYon maps scales to the keyboard so that there are no “wrong notes,” and so that each column of keys plays a chord. The name is short for “QWERTY accordion,” because the idea is to make the computer keyboard as accessible for novice musicians as the chord buttons on an accordion. A few years ago, the NYU Music Experience Design Lab launched a web application called the aQWERTYon.
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