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vpavlenko
study-music
Learning & Reference2022–2025
vpavlenko / study-music

study-music

An "awesome music theory" kinda wiki with books, resources and courses for studying everything about music and sound

Learning & ReferenceCreative & Media
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An "awesome music theory" kinda wiki with books, resources and courses for studying everything about music and sound

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-02-21 11:38:53 UTC to 2025-11-06 18:48:57 UTC.

01232022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 2 submissions, 1 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC321
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
vitaly-pavlenko·Nov 6, 2025
So here I stand with dilettantes :) Being a jazz college dropout, I stopped building around standard notation when after two years of training - and I started learning piano at 25 - I still didn't get any fluency in instantly seeing harmonic structure in the scores. I don't care that much about articulation. I can hear articulation anyways. What I care about is the elusive layer of harmony which is so hard to reason about without the right tools. That's why people do Roman numerals, figured bass, all sorts of annotation: https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music/blob/main/parts/cla... And that's what I was chasing. Something that gives me, a guy who didn't spent formative years of K-12 by sight-reading at the piano, a way to build mental models of how Western harmony works. And here, I believe, I'm with the majority of people.
In Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
vitaly-pavlenko·Sep 4, 2024
I have a detailed write-up in this thread: https://x.com/vitalypavlenko/status/1771820942680830417 Basically, you can somewhat see chords in sheet music. Like, you can easily see a C major chord in a treble clef. 1) How many milliseconds does it take you to understand that the entire bar you're looking at is just a C major chord arpeggiated in different octaves? 2) What if it's a bass + treble clef? What if it's an orchestral score? 3) How fast can you verify that a treble clef is active now? That it's not a C-sharp major or a C major chord? 4) Do you actually care that it's a C major chord or rather should you care that it's a I chord (a tonic major chord)? 5) If you care about relative chords (Roman numerals), does it mean you should learn 7 to 12 times visual cues of what's going on now? These are just the beginning questions, where th
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e end questions that I care about are: 101) What are the backbone structures making a list of midi pitches played suddenly a tango? A ragtime? A malaguena? A Bulgarian horo? 102) What are differences between styles (languages) of specific composers? How do I rapidly see what's different between Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo? Between Chopin and Schumann? Between (tonal) Copland and (tonal) Debussy? 103) How do I imitate any of those or any fusion of those? How do I make sure that I don't miss any structural feature when I analyze and decompose their style and their pieces? Literature: https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music
In Chromatone – Visual Music Language
vitaly-pavlenko·Jan 28, 2024Submission

Show HN: 12-colored visual interactive music theory for pop/rock MIDI (+Github)

I'm sharing an early prototype of my open-source interactive book and MIDI viewer. My approach is to annotate a tonic and phrasing in each file, so that chords become visible as 3-4 color bundles after a bit of training. This radically simplifies seeing and hearing chords, so that you can rapidly browse through many arrangements and study Western harmonic/arrangement language If you don't have a touchpad, a horizontal scrolling can be done via shift+mouse wheel (generally on the web). Also, I have a second color scheme that I tried to optimized for people with color vision deficiencies. My big dream now is to have all piano rolls in DAWs support 12-coloring (in any color scheme really), so that the music can be seen as less complex, less gatekeeped and less entangled. It's not as hard as I've seen it before. Source code: https://github.co
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m/vpavlenko/rawl It currently doesn't play music from Russia or Türkiye (=requires a VPN), because I rely on corsproxy.io internally which blocks access from those countries. I plan to rehost stuff on S3 soon to fix that. Also, it's more performant in Chrome than in Safari - audio clicks less. === Backstory: I quit Whatsapp in 2021 to focus full-time on studying music theory. Along that I've assembled a list of resources to see the frontier: https://github.com/vpavlenko/study-music My biggest inspiration is Hooktheory - an interactive book that teaches how melody and chords interact in Western pop music. After it I wanted to study how the rest of the arrangement works - what the bass line is doing, how is melody doubled, what chromatic chords are possible, are there any functional pre-dominants and dominants in mixolydian or dorian etc. I wanted to focus on music for which the complete arrangement is clean and available. This is early chiptune (NES/Genesis) OSTs and MIDI arrangements (primarily created in 1990s). As I plugged MIDIs into my front-end, I discovered that the harmonic analysis - the cornerstone of studying Western harmony - can be done by eyes in real-time. That is, if you color the notes consistently, the chords start to stare at you, sharply and memorably. I'm intrigued by latest shifts towards corpus studies in music theory and I'm generally happy that nowadays the research is not just about classical music anymore. At least in the West.
101 points · Open discussion

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