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Frame from Flying Dream Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Flying Dream

Gary Garrett
Music
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this music video4 months2014–2020 score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Shared as a beautiful example of lattice-based harmony visualization.

Gary Garrett's stop-motion animation of his song Flying Dream, with notes arranged on a lattice of fifths and major thirds. It shows how harmony looks in just intonation, inspired by Harmonic Experience.

“this beautiful song using it” (HN, 2019)

1 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 2 citations · Music · intermediate

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@baddox Sep 2014 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Musical Scale Generator
It looks like there's no problem with just swapping frequencies as you change chords. This youtube video is great, as is the guy's blog: [this video]
Video on chord changes and frequencies, with a good blog.
@williamdclt Mar 2019 Recommends
on HN thread Show HN: Harmopark – Web tool to visually build chords and progressions
Read more
Very interesting, I'll definitely play with it for a bit! I came across this concept of "lattice" about a year ago too, with this beautiful song using it: [this video] A couple of comments: - Why select notes by right-clicking rather than left-clicking? - When building a chord, it shows the name on top and the scale degree below. But it's the opposite when I drag it to the chord progression zone, it confused me - Might be worth it to add a few tooltips or links for help (eg explaining what's a "parallel progression") - I don't understand why notes are more or less red - It'd be useful to show the scale degree of each note in the lattice (in addition to the note itself and its octave)
Beautiful song using the lattice concept.
@isolli May 2020 Recommends
on HN thread Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third
Gary Garrett is a musician who works with just intonation (or, as he calls it, untempered music) [0]. Below is a link to a piece he composed [1]. Definitely worth checking out. [0] [link] [1] [this video]
Piece composed in untempered just intonation.
@elihu Nov 2020 Recommends
on HN thread How to create minimal music with code in any programming language
For ii, I find it helps to add 10:9 to the list I gave earlier, I just omitted it to stay within the familiar framework of 12 notes-to-the-octave. 12 really isn't enough, though, in a lot of cases. Here's a visualization I like, that uses 22 notes: [this video] Speaking of large-number EDOs, some people I know locally are doing guitar conversions to 41-EDO. The trick that seems like it absolutely shouldn't work but it does is to omit half the frets, so that only half of the notes are available on each string. [link]
Visualization using 22 notes per octave.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@elihu May 2017 Cites it
on HN thread Get started making music
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Another way to look at it is that the current notation system isn't the best overall, it's just the most tolerable trade-off between a bunch of mutually-incompatible requirements. Replacing standard notation for all uses may be doomed to failure, but replacing standard notation for some particular use case (especially new use cases that weren't anticipated when standard notation settled into its current form) may be a very useful thing to do. Computers also give us a few new options, such as displaying notation in a time-varying form, or using three dimensions, or notating the music in some universal language that isn't necessarily easy to read but that can be easily rendered in any desired notation. Lattice notation for instance is something I really like, but I don't know how to represent it without some kind of animation. Here's an example I stumbled across on Youtube awhile back of the kind of thing I mean: [this video] Lattices generalize to higher dimensions, which means they might be amenable to virtual reality or even some sort of human-brain interface that allows you to experience 4 or 5 spacial dimensions at the same time.
Example of animated lattice notation.
@zodiac Jan 2018 Cites it
on HN thread Moonlight Sonata Visualized (2012) [video]
As baddox mentioned - gary garrett does this! eg [this video] I have been wondering for a while if it's possible to show both harmonic and melodic relationships at the same time - garett's visualization shows the b7 to 1 movement as a large harmonic leap, but hides the fact that it's a small melodic movement
Example of Garrett's harmonic visualization.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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