Working in Harmony
Part of Working in Harmony.
You are here
On this page:
- Your feedback
- Planned improvements
- Data protection
Other pages:
- Click here to use the app
- Index: home page for using the app
- Notes for Analysts: detailed notes on writing harmonic analyses in Roman numerals
- Behind the scenes: more about how the app works
- Motivation: why do this(?!), and more about score formats
Your feedback
We aim to continue improving this service by providing more specific, useful, and detailed feedback, with fewer false positives.
We welcome any feedback you might have, whether you’ve found errors in how the bot works, or opinions about which features are / aren’t / would be useful. We’re happy to integrate further functionality, but bear in mind that anything we include will need to work automatically for all tonal music. If your idea meets those criteria then please do get in touch, with the logical steps written out clearly and unequivocally, and preferably with some examples of edge cases that the system should / should not catch.
Planned improvements
A clear next step is to add functionality that will provide more context-sensitive feedback, noting that:
- a chord or progression can be common in certain contexts and rarer in others and
- there are minimum conditions that really ought to be met when modulating. For instance, a modulation that lasts only one chord would trigger some feedback, perhaps suggesting a tonicisation within the prevailing key.
We’re also keen to be guided by the data: not only for looking at what ‘mistakes’ the app commonly makes (flagging up areas that are fine and missing moments that are dubious) but also at what users do. What are the kinds of issues for which analysts actually need spell-checker style feedback? Speaking of which …
Data protection
In order to improve and extend the services we offer, we will keep anonymous copies of the analyses submitted to this site. Absolutely no personal data will be retained at any time; this is strictly about advancing Four Score and More’s goal of extending access to music theory, (we promise there’s nothing nefarious going on!). Basically, not only are you getting free, Roman numeral analysis feedback, but you’re also contributing to the development of the fields of music theory and music theory pedagogy. Whether you get the analysis ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, your analysis is an important part of the process. Four Score and More is especially focussed on areas like this which connect the interests and activities of music theorists, students, musicians, and music-enthusiasts alike.
Conversely, if you actively want to share your analysis and be identified as its author, then simply identify yourself in the ‘Analyst:’ line of the Roman text file, or somewhere on the on-score analysis and we’ll keep that data point.