User:Napsy/sandbox

= 144 Notes =

144 Notes is a visual representation of musical notes, where colors are used as symbols to represent pitches.

Since human visual system can connect colors with locations, 144 Notes is useful to explain pitch composition of musical instruments.

Every note’s pitch is represented with 2 predefined colors. First color is the color of octave (number) that the note belongs to and it is represented as background color. It represents approximate pitch.

The second color represents the exact position of the note inside that octave. So it’s used as a symbol to represent the exact pitch.

To contain all notes in the range of human hearing it was took span of 12 octaves, from -1 to 10 on the Scientific pitch notation. Since every octave contains 12 semitones, there are altogether 144 notes with 144 color combinations. From here the name origin “144 Notes”. Starting with cool color hues for lower pitches and continuing to more warm hues for middle and higher pitches.

All 144 notes with related colors from lower to higher pitches in Dutch naming system:

144 Notes Algorithm
144 Notes Algorithm is a website application that uses 144 Notes as a main advantage for teaching music.

Users can select notes by hovering the mouse over the instrument or by clicking on it. When the note is selected it is also represented on the ribbon placed above the instrument that contains all 144 notes. Notes on the ribbon are arranged orderly by pitch, lowest on the left side, to the highest on the right side. There are 6 instruments available: the guitar, bass guitar, 5 string bass guitar, 6 string bass guitar, the piano and the violin. The instruments can also be compared to each other and tuned by the visitors.

144 Notes Algorithm supports more than 40 naming conventions. It has utilities to select different scales, tonics, chords and chord roots, if wanted all at the same time, so that they can be compared and studied. Many new combinations are possible so it can be used for composing music.

The Guitar compared to piano in 144 Notes Algorithm. It is easily seen that the guitar is far more musically complicated instrument than the piano. The image represents different positions of the 3C Major chord on the guitar while there is just one position of 3C Major on the piano. C Major scale is selected (white keys on the piano).

144 Notes was designed by Marko Kopač and 144 Notes Algorithm is co-authored by Andraž Kopač.

Both, 144 Notes and 144 Notes Algorithm are released under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.