November 6, 2025
When harmony meets hot takes
Show HN: See chords as flags – Visual harmony of top composers on musescore
Music nerds cheer, purists rage, and Safari faceplants
TLDR: A new tool shows music as colorful “flag” chords you can play from any MIDI, aiming to make harmony easy to see. The crowd is split between excited tinkerers and sheet‑music loyalists, debating color choices and a Safari crash—highlighting how design and stability can make or break learning tools.
A new Show HN turns music into candy-colored flags, letting you drop a MIDI file and watch chords pop like fireworks. It maps every note to a color so you can “see” harmony across pieces from MuseScore’s top composers—plus a friendly demo with “Happy Birthday.” Fans yelled very cool, linked to the creator’s own deep dive, and ran off to jam with Strudel. But the honeymoon ended fast.
The community split along a familiar fault line: piano-roll people vs. sheet-music purists. One critic asked why not just color real notation, arguing the piano-roll loses info—“like, almost all of it.” Others compared it to Hooktheory, praising the idea but noting that site’s crowd-sourced annotations. Then came the color war: a designer type begged for a smarter palette—tie colors to musical closeness (think the circle of fifths) instead of rainbow chaos. And the final twist? An iOS Safari crash report that was equal parts bug and punchline: it “could either be profitable or annoying.”
So, is it a learning breakthrough or a pretty toy? The crowd can’t agree, but they’re absolutely talking—geeks swooning, purists fuming, and everyone rubbernecking the crash report like it’s a season finale.
Key Points
- •The project uses a custom piano-roll, color-coded notation anchored to the tonic to visualize musical structures.
- •Users can drop a MIDI file to play and explore pieces interactively.
- •The article explains the 12-note chromatic set and provides traditional and flat chromatic keyboard layouts.
- •It demonstrates building diatonic triads from the major scale and analyzes “Happy Birthday” using three left-hand chords.
- •A corpus links to popular works by notable composers, forming part of the “Top 100 MuseScore Composers” exploration.