teaching machines

Chords

June 15, 2019 by . Filed under electronics, music, public.

This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data.

First order of business: switch partners. Choose a partner that you haven’t worked with yet.

An instrument is a device that maps input from the musician to the output that we hear. Every instrument has a certain number of inputs and outputs. Let’s think about the various ways these inputs and outputs might be arranged:

We’re about to make an instrument that’s a member of the one-to-many family. We’ll activate a single input and it will produce many outputs. Before we get to it, however, we need to be talk a bit about combining multiple notes at a time.

Scales

Musicians have cataloged many sequences or scales of notes that can be used to produce pleasing sounds. Scales start at a root note and jump up from the root in a particular pattern. Because the scale is defined in terms relative to the root, it is not an exact sequence of notes. Rather, it is a relative sequence, built up from the root chosen by the musician.

Major Scale

One of the most common scales in Western music is the major scale. The C major scale is rooted at C, the F♯ major scale is rooted at F♯, and so on. Let’s see how the major scale progresses. For reference, here is the MIDI number table we saw earlier.

octave C C♯ D E♭ E F F♯ G A♭ A B♭ B
0 21 22 23
1 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
2 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47
3 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59
4 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71
5 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83
6 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95
7 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

The universal definition of the major scale describes the halfstep jumps between notes, starting at the root:

root in octave i
+2
+2
+1
+2
+2
+2
+1

Using this table, answer the following questions:

When we start writing code, you will find it useful to know exactly how far from the root each note is—not just how far a note is from its predecessor. The third note, for example is +2 +2, or 4 half-steps from the root.

What are the distances from the root for each of the notes in the major scale?
0
2
4
5
7
9
11
12

Many other scales exist, but they only differ in their list of offsets. We’ll see others later.

Triadic Chords

Play any note in the major scale. Play the note two jumps beyond. Play the note two more jumps beyond. Play all three of those notes at the same time and you have a triadic chord, or a triad. It will sound pleasant.

Musicians name the triads that you can play using their starting note. If you pick the root of the scale, you are playing a I chord (read “one chord”) in that scale. If you pick the second note, you are playing the ii chord (read “two chord”). Here’s the whole list:

I
ii
iii
IV
V
vi
vii

They are written in Roman numerals, but some are capitalized and some are not. The uppercase chords are called major chords, and the lowercase chords are called minor chords. Let’s figure out the offsets of these chords from the root. The I chord consists of:

So, the I chord is comprised of offsets 0, 4, and 7. Let’s work through the offsets for the rest of the chords:

Based on the list, what do all the major chords have in common? The minor chords?
The major chords jump +4 +3. The minor chords jump +3 +4. Except for the vii chord, which jumps +3 +3. Musicians say that the vii chord is diminished.

Our next instrument will play triadic chords in the major scale, so keep your list of offsets around.