The House Harmonic Filler: interactive exploration of chord sequences by means of an intuitive representation

Abstract

In this paper we present an interactive two-dimensional representation of musical chord progressions, integrated into a computer program that generates house music harmonic loops in MIDI format, based on a user’s input. Our aim is to encapsulate relevant tonal information and display it in ways that are easy to understand for novices and untrained musicians, facilitating the creative exploration of musical ideas. We briefly reference previous work on tonal visualisation and interaction, and introduce some measures of tonal properties from the literature. We then present our system and describe the two-dimensional harmonic map, before discussing its outcomes and shortcomings, pointing at future lines of research in the conclusions.