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The newest chord progressions added to The Changes this morning, include
Henk Hoeksma from the Netherlands has provided me with the chord sequences of 421 tunes that haven't been listed in The Changes before. His collection included 525 tunes, but I've already listed 104 of his. The new tunes from this morning are the first installment from Henk's collection. Even better he has tracked down the progressions for the verses for many of these tunes. For those who are not familiar with the idea of a verse, that is a usually vocal introduction that was written to make a dramatic transition into a song when it was performed as part of a show. The melody and harmony used in the verse are usually quite a bit simpler than those used in the chorus, the section which follows the verse which most people think of as the main body of the tune. When a song was sung later by other vocalists, many times they omitted the verse. Jazz performers also frequently omit it, since the pianists in bands pride themselves on the intros that they can invent themselevs. Despite all of that, it's good to have the verse so you can see the entirety of the composer's work.. Henk's chord progression listings are in a binary storage format that he runs through a BASIC language program to produce lists of changes in text format. I was able to write translator routines for my text editor to read his format and produce the MIDI files and GIF scores that SongTrellis users expect to see. I also wrote a small piece of code to produce the same kind of text listings of changes that he uses. Better progression scores, starting today In the course of writing my translation code, I decided to add a few features to my editor which will improve the progression scores listed on SongTrellis. I've already added the ability to force staff breaks and to justify scores so that each staff ends at the same right boundary. You'll see this in the scores added today. In the next week or so, I hope to finally hope to be able to handle repeats, alternate endings and codas. Once those new features are in place, I'll be able to run scripts that will translate Henk's listings enmasse. After those run I hope to add 5 or 10 new tunes from his collection every day or two. Navigate by Composer I use the Manila webserver that ships with Userland Frontier to host SongTrellis. The discussion group software that Manila provides is the underpinning of the SongDiscussions group on this site. Manila rightfully assumes that it's important to keep track of who submits each message to the site and maintains a Submitted By link on each page in the discussion group. In a music site like SongTrellis where a great many pages actually contain compositions or fragments of them, it's of equal or greater interest to know who composed the music stored on a page. It has always embarassed me to to see that Google search results that show SongTrellis pages frequently show that I submitted a piece but don't mention the composer anywhere. I've customized the Manila code to show a Composer link right after the title of any music page. When Google finally gets around to reindexing my pages, I can stop cringing. There's a cool function that you can access if you click on one these links. If for example, you follow today's link to All Too Soon you'll notice that there is a composer field that shows a link to Duke Ellington. If you click on the composer name, you'll be brought to a list of all of the compositions on the site that were composed by that composer, in this case Duke Ellington. This is the same kind of list as what's generated for the in-demand composers that show up on the right side of the Changes page. But now every composer represented on the site has their own list. blog comments powered by Disqus
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Last update: Friday, March 29, 2002 at 9:54 PM. |
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