Harmonic navigator: An innovative, gesture-driven user interface for exploring harmonic spaces in musical corpora

Abstract

We present Harmonic Navigator (HN), a system for navigating and exploring harmonic spaces extracted from large musical corpora, to be used in music composition and performance. A harmonic space is a set of harmonies (chords) and transitions between harmonies found in a music corpus. By navigating this space, the user can derive new harmonic progressions, which have correct voice leading. HN is controllable via a Kinect gesture interface. To aid the user, the system also incorporates stochastic and evolutionary techniques. HN offers for two primary modes of interaction: a harmonic transition selector, called harmonic palette, which utilizes a GUI to navigate harmonic transitions in a front-to-back manner; and a harmonic-flow scrubber, which presents a global overview of a harmonic flow and allows the user to perform common audio scrubbing and editing tasks. Both GUIs use colors to indicate harmonic density based on Legname's density degree theory. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.