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Re: Chords and what they mean


From: Frauke Jurgensen
Subject: Re: Chords and what they mean
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 12:11:44 +0100

Speaking as a theorist here: while there are automatic chord analysis functions in many notation programs, in my experience, they are all not yet sufficiently aware of context (upon which a harmonic analysis is heavily dependent) and analysis style. It's quite easy to label chords as to the pure vertical content, but such labeling is going to be meaningless without the context. Others have gone into the problem of assuming enharmonic equivalence and labeling <G C E> as Em#5, so I won't, but I'll add that if the G is the bottom note, then in much of the music I deal with, you can safely assume that the C and E do not have harmonic function and are ornamental notes, or that the entire simultaneity is of a decorative rather than functional nature. Explaining functional harmony to a computer is a bit more difficult than labeling the content of a simultaneity. There are various approaches in computational musicology, and I'd be happy to find some links if people are sufficiently interested.

As for the 15th century, while chordal analysis in the post-Rameau, functional sense is a bit silly, there's quite a lot of mileage to be found in examining successions of simultaneities. It's my special field, as a matter of fact...the usual software to help with analysis of this sort is Humdrum or music21. I don't know how many of the other people involved with those are in this group, but since a bunch of them use LilyPond, they may yet wander into this thread!

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 2:39 PM, BB <address@hidden> wrote:
Can you really feed some notes to Lilypond and it tells you the name of the chord? A kind of reverse chord finder? I have not found in the manual.

Is'nt the composer the person to define the desired sound in defining notes and chord colours?

Again: There is not just one single name for an essamble of more than three notes. And even with three notes there are inversions possible. A c chord usually is <c e g>, with c the lowest note and g the highest. What's with <e g c>? It is  Em#5 or C/E - you have the choice. And <g c e> is C/G or Em#5/G. Now do the same with 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ... note chords.


On 18.09.2015 09:10, address@hidden wrote:
On Fri, 18 Sep 2015, Blöchl Bernhard wrote:
I tried to make clear that there is not just a single correct name for a
chord. That is only true for the simplest chords of our simple original folk
When someone enters a set of notes and asks LilyPond to print the chord
name, there's such a thing as a wrong answer, even if there may also be
more than one answer you would call correct.  LilyPond has to print
something and it would be preferable that it prints one of the correct
answers.  What rules should LilyPond follow to determine what it prints?



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