Tritonet

Tritonet is a musical abacus which provides an innovative way of learning and applying music harmony. It makes learning music theory much more accessible by focusing on building the intuition behind harmony. Tritonet can be seen as an evolution of the Circle of Fifths into the 21st century, enabling a wide array of possibilities for utilising music theory both in the traditional sense and in terms of exploring new territories. In modern times, the artistic side of music has been overshadowing the fundamentally quantitative and aesthetic free part of harmony -- and this is how it was seen in the Quadrivium. Tritonet is attempting to resurrect this side of music, by bringing back the attention onto the ratios and symmetries which underpin music harmony. Learning music harmony in medieval times took more than a decade. The Guidonian hand method, introduced in the 12th century as a visual helper, revolutionised theoretical education -- it allowed musicians to learn it in about two years. Tritonet, introduced a millennium later as an interactive visual helper, aims to dramatically shorten the duration of study required to internalise music harmony.

Tritonet is implemented as a set of Max/MSP patches which provide a music harmony toolset for the music production in Ableton Live. At its core, Tritonet enables controlling the harmony of an entire Ableton project. It is a harmony performance device. It enables users to change harmony on the fly (even on stage). It enables your MIDI instruments to play in tune, even when using complex and dynamic harmonic structures. It lays out the scale into the keyboard symmetrically around the note D, enabling users to play by relying on their intuition and sense of symmetry without assuming knowledge of musical scales. It can also produce smooth chord sequences with voice leading; chord information is distributed via "Dynamic Pitch Mapping" to multiple tracks, changing their initial scales dynamically; this allows MIDI clips to follow the harmonic structure of the Ableton project.

Use cases: - You are a film composer and dealing with symphonic settings. When you want to change the a chordal structure, it takes so much time to get into each track and make the necessary changes. Tritonet allows you to change it with one click. You can also make a harmonic variation of the music very easily. - You are a home producer and you have a limited knowledge about harmony. Tritonet allows you to design your own harmonic structure or just use a harmonic template to start with. Moreover, it allows you to play your keyboard or pad instrument with confidence since the harmonic layout dynamically changes under your fingers, based on the symmetry on the keyboard, so you can start thinking patterns. - You are a father and would like to teach your five year old kid how the harmony works. You can simply teach that counterclockwise motion gives resolution and goes through the bright side, yet clockwise gives tension and dark side. You can make your kid to create a story based on sense of direction without knowing the notes. - You play in a band with multiple MIDI instrument players. You can harmonically sync by using OSC connection so everyone ensure to play not only in scale but also in the song chords.