The colortriads filter assigns colors to vertical sonorities according to their diatonic triadic root. The colors are assigned using colors of the rainbow mapped to the circle-of-fifths, with C centered in the middle at green:
The color green represents vertical sonorities with the three diatonic pitch classes C, E, and G. Any chromatic alterations of these pitch classes are also given a green color, such as C, E-flat, G, or C-sharp, E, G-flat.
Here is a Bach chorale with colored triadic sonorities:
Circle-of-fifth root motions are visualized by cycling through the colors of the rainbow such as in measures 10–11 where the chord sequence E major, B minor, F-sharp minor are shown in the colors red, orange and yellow. Looking at the fermata chords, most of them are red, indicating E major (V), with an orange one on B minor (ii), and the last chord in purple, indicating A major (I).
Non-triadic sonorities are left uncolored. This will typically be non-harmonic tones and seventh chords in the chorales. Occasionally a note will be in two or more separate triadic sonorities, such as at the beginning of measure 6 where the downbeat is a D-major chord, and the double passing tones create a G-diminished sonority:
In such cases the pitches shared between sonorities will only be given one color, depending on which triadic root was assigned color first.
Functional coloring
Adding the -r option (meaning “relative”) will instead color the
triadic sonorities by function, using green as the tonic:
An initial key designation, such as *a: for A minor, is needed
to identify the tonic.
Alternately, the -k option can be used
to supply a key designation if there is none in the data:
Now E is treated as the tonic.
Here is an example of the same Bach chorale with functional coloring:
Now the fermata sonorities on the dominant chords are colored light blue, the supertonic is dark blue, and the tonic is green.
Such functional coloring allows easier comparison of chord functions between pieces in different keys. You can scroll through the chorales with the arrow buttons at the top left side of the VHV window, or use shift-right and shift-left to browse through the VHV Bach chorale repertory.
Changing colors
Color assignments can be changed with the -a through -g
options. Here is an example of changing C triads from green to fuscia:
Any SVG color can be used,
as well as HTML color codes. To change the color
for A sonorities, use -a, for B sonorities use -b, and so on.
Suppressing colors
Use options -A through -G to suppress coloring triads containing
that root. Single-letter options can be glued to each other, so the option
-ABC in the example below is equivalent to -A -B -C:
Extended coloring
The colortriads filter is a front-end to the msearch
filter. Using the command-line version of colortriads, you can extract
the calls to the msearch filter by adding the --filters option:
colortriads --filters file.krn
The default settings will produce this output:
!!!filter: msearch -p (=ace) -m V --color darkviolet
!!!filter: msearch -p (=bdf) -m Z --color darkorange
!!!filter: msearch -p (=ceg) -m @ --color limegreen
!!!filter: msearch -p (=dfa) -m "|" --color royalblue
!!!filter: msearch -p (=egb) -m j --color crimson
!!!filter: msearch -p (=fac) -m + --color gold
!!!filter: msearch -p (=gbd) -m N --color skyblue
There are seven calls to msearch, one for each triadic root to
color. The --color option sets the color, which is red by default.
The -m option is used to specify the user signifier that will
mark the note (and cause it to be colored). This can be a character
in the set “NVZ@|+ijl” plus others with varying degrees of success,
such as characters in the set “kKhPps”. Note that mark characters
must be unique; otherwise, different color assignments with a shared
mark will collapse to one of those colors. Unicode characters may
be allowed (or will be allowed in the future).
The -p option give the pitch pattern to search for. The pattern
(=ace) means to search for a vertical sonority that contains one
or more of each of the three pitch classes A, C, and E. The
parentheses indicate a harmonic search (rather than a melodic
search), and the equals sign requires that only the listed pitch
classes be present in the sonority (without the equals sign, other
pitch classes are allowed).
If you want to refine the coloring you can copy the above filters as a template to color in various ways. For example, to color A minor triads dark violet and A major triads medium purple, use these two commands:
!!!filter: msearch -p (=ancnen) -m N --color darkviolet
!!!filter: msearch -p (=anc#en) -m V --color mediumpurple
The query “ancnen” means A-natural, C-natural and E-natural, with space between notes optional. When giving a chromatic alteration to a diatonic pitch class, only that variant will be colored, allowing for different colors to be assigned to major and minor chords.
In a similar manner, dominant seventh chords could colored:
To view the command-line commands rather than as filters,
use the --commands option:
colortriads --commands file.krn
msearch -p (=ace) -m V --color darkviolet
msearch -p (=bdf) -m Z --color darkorange
msearch -p (=ceg) -m @ --color limegreen
msearch -p (=dfa) -m "|" --color royalblue
msearch -p (=egb) -m j --color crimson
msearch -p (=fac) -m + --color gold
msearch -p (=gbd) -m N --color skyblue
Limitations
Coloring is currently limited to monophonic parts, with limited capabilities for coloring chords and sub-spines (multi-voiced) parts, as is commonly found in piano music. The ability to color these textures will be added in the future.