Learning about harmony with Harmony Space: an overview

Abstract

Recent developments are presented in the evolution of Harmony Space, an interface that exploits theories of tonal harmony. The design of the interface draws on Balzano's and Longuet-Higgins' theories of tonal harmony. The interface allows entities of interest (notes, chords, chord progressions, key areas, modulations) to be manipulated via direct manipulation techniques using a single principled spatial metaphor to make a wide range of musical tasks accessible for novices to perform. The interface can also be used by experienced musicians to make a range of expert tasks more tractable than by using conventional tools and notations. The interface is highly interactive and multi-modal, using two pointing devices and spatial, aural and kinaesthetic cues that all map uniformly into the underlying theory. Some recent implementations of Harmony Space are discussed, together with some of the musical tasks which they make tractable for beginners and experienced musicians. Aspects of the simple, consistent, principled framework behind the interface are outlined.

What Can the Language of Musicians Tell Us about Music Interaction Design?

“…Two contrasting examples of music software were chosen, Harmony Space (Holland 1994) and GarageBand (Apple 2009). Harmony Space was chosen as a user interface that is systematically and richly designed to exploit spatial metaphors for harmonic concepts.…”

“…Based on the Longuet-Higgins (1962) and Balzano (1980) theories of harmonic perception, Harmony Space (Holland 1994) is designed to teach novices principles of tonal harmony and harmonic progression, by exploiting users' intuitive prior knowledge of, for example, straight-line movement, proximity judgments and visual grouping. By this means, the need for prior specialized domain knowledge of musical concepts is reduced.…”

“…Indeed, the main display of Harmony Space, by design, represents pitch and harmonic relationships using three spatial dimensions (Holland 1994). This threedimensional relationship may indicate the existence of other, as yet unidentified conceptual metaphors that could conceivably afford a better conceptual model for certain categories of users.…”

Running up Blueberry Hill

“…The principles of musical harmony are generally taught in a symbolic manner using a specialised notation and terminology via abstract, domain-specific concepts, principles, rules and heuristics. By contrast, when harmony is visualised, analysed, manipulated and created using metaphors embodied in the existing interactive desktop tool Harmony Space [1,2] which is grounded in two wellestablished theories of music cognition and perception [3,4] a new, parsimonious, but equivalently expressive, unified level of description emerges [1,5,6]. This metaphorical level of description focuses on moving objects; locations; centres, trajectories; and moveable 'allowed' and 'forbidden' areas, to be navigated while meeting rhythmic time constraints.…”

“…Following Papert's notion of body-syntonic learning [7], we were interested in whether participants could exploit their situated sense of space and how their bodies move to gain a deeper understanding of harmonic relationships. A previous 'human-powered' pilot study in Utrecht [5] with no computer-based elements, using physical labels on the floor, a large manually-moved wooden frame, and musicians employed in a Wizard-of-Oz role, demonstrated the potential of whole body navigation of Harmony Space for free composition by musically expert players. In the present study, new goals included identifying possible benefits, both to beginners and accomplished musicians, that a more flexible computerbased whole-body version of Harmony Space might provide.…”