ChordATune Awards & Publications

Awards

1. The Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Award Merit award – APICTA 2009 (Melbourn)
2. National Best Quality Software Awards (Project – ChordATune) bronze award – NBQSA 2009 British Computer Society
3. Academic Excellence Award (Project – ChordATune) Third Place - Cutting Edge Exhibition Informatics Institute of Technology (June 2009)

Publications

1. Interactive Machine Learning for Incorporating User Emotions in Automatic Music Harmonization. Proceeding of the 5th International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability (ICIAfS'10).
2. ChordATune - An Emotion based Melody Harmonizer for Piano Music. Proceedings of the The Second International Conference on Technology for Education (T4E'10) IIT Bombay, Mumbai.

ChordATune Technical Introduction

Create Your Own Music Using ChordATune

ChordATune is a music making software where users can create their own creative music and mabe use them to create birthday cards, home made videos, play it using your guitar .. and many more. ChordATune also allows you to harmonize a known song and find their accompaniments.
In this section I will give you a step by step guide on how you can create music using ChordATune .

1. Creating a song.

There are several ways to create melodies in ChordATune.

1. Using an existing midi file (if you have an already exsisting melody and don't know how to get the base chords) ..
2. Using a manuscript Editor - ChordATune provides a well known tools to create manuscript notations (if you know your music theory)
3. Using a virtual Piano.

I will explain how you can create your own melodies using the virtual piano provided by ChordATune

In the main frame of ChordATune, under creation mode select piano from the drop down list and click on create a song.

Then you will get a virtual piano as shown below ..


Here you can click on the key board and create your melody once you create the melody you can click on play to listen to your creation. If you don't like the sound of it you can click on edit and delete the unnecessary notes. If you don't like the entire melody you can click on clear and start over. To view your melody in a manuscript notation click on view. Once you are done click on save to save your creation. :)



2. Generating the harmony

Now that you have a melody you need to generate the harmony (base chords) to accompany you melody. In order to harmonize you need to follow the following steps

1. Select the time signature (in simple terms its the beat of your melody)
2. Input the midi file (the melody you just created) - you can listen to the melody once u input the melody
3. Giving the emotional factor (harmony depends on user emotions therefore its important to specify what kind of song you want ie a happy song, sad song ect (if you don't like a particular harmony generated by ChordATune you can always change the emotional factor and get a complete different harmony.
4. Generate Harmony

3 . Display Harmony

Once you generate the harmony there are several options to display the harmony.

1. Selecting the genre - You can select the genre(style) of your choice while displaying the harmony. There are several styles allowed in ChordATune. (ie Rhumba, Swing, Disco, Rock, March)
2. Selecting the drum beat - According to the genre users can select different drum beats)
3. Changing the tempo - if you want to change your tempo of your song you can change the tempo using this functionality
4. Display the harmony

Now you know how to create a simple song using ChordATune. It is advice to give different variations and experiment with your creation by choosing different emotional factors/ changing the genre/drum beat and tempo to get the best result of your choice. This way you can add your own creativity to your song.


ChordATune also allows you to generate the guitar tabs (fingering positions of guitar chords) for you melody for the guitar players :) by selecting the display style as guitar.



ChordATune also allows you to print your music as sheet music by clicking display printable version.


Now you can go to your piano/guiatar and play your music !!!

Music Technology

ChordATune - Overveiw

ChordATune is an emotion based melody harmonizer concerning piano music. ChordATune can be used to create your own melodies using a virtual piano or a manuscript editor tool. Where you can easily create edit and display your melody. It provides variation of tools for the process to create music in a user friendly manner. Once you create your melody you can directly give your melody for the process of harmonization. You can also give an already existing midi file (melody) for the harmonization.



ChordATune makes the harmonization process easy. It gives variety of harmony for the same song. If you do not like a particular harmony produced by ChordATune; you can always change the emotional factor and generate a complete different harmony for your melody or else you can change the style(genre) and get a different style of harmony. Users can interactively change the harmony by changing the emotional slider o the genre of the music.
ChordATune also allows to add drum beats for different styles (genres) and generate the final harmony in a manuscript notation and also in midi format. Users can also change the tempo. Guitar lovers can generate guitar tabs for given melody and generate harmony in a guitar tabular format using ChordATune

ChordATune features

• Create your own melodies using a virtual piano/ a manuscript editor.
• Generate harmony according to emotions interactively (If you don't like the harmony u can always change the emotional factor o the genre and get a complete different set of chords).
• Add Drum beats to your melody
• Arrange harmony according to the genre (user preferred style ie Disco, Rhumba, Swing, March, Rock).
• Change the tempo.
• Display guitar tabular format (guitar chords ) for a tune.
  
• Generate manuscript notation to your harmony/melody
• Save MIDI files/Manuscript files in PDF format
• Play Stop Print functionality

Check out ChordATune in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZeizWDnOc

Why Harmonization ? - Importance of harmonizing a melody

One of the biggest problem in song writing or piano playing (o creating your own music) is the problem of harmonization. In this blog I discuss why harmonization is crucial (getting the right chords to the right notes) and how we can overcome this problem using and interactive tool called ChordATune.

Power of harmonization
Play Melody
Play Harmonized Melody


Music is made out of melody and harmony. Melody is the basic tune of a song (which we can easily hum o we can just guess the notes using a keyboard). Harmony on the other hand is the accompaniments to a melody (base chords, drumbeats ect) which makes your song complete. Harmonization is a crucial part in song writing o piano playing because only by harmonization you can make your melody rich and power and also add emotions and color to your song. However, many people face the problem of harmonizing because you need extensive knowledge in music, years of training and practice and also some musicality in you to harmonize a song accurately.

This is where the ChordATune comes in handy... ChordATune is a powerful harmonization tool. Not only just harmonization, you can also create your own melodies the way you want (using a virtual piano or manuscript editor) and make it complete by harmonization. ChordATune let user have variety of harmonies according users emotions and styles and also provide drum beats to make your song have a rocking beat!!.ChordATune output the harmonize melody in manuscript and midi formats. ChordATune also provides a feature of guitar players where they can get guitar chords in guitar tabular format for an any given tune.

This blog is about ChordATune and its powerful features. Now you can create your own music the way you want and also ChordATune provides a mechanism to save your creations in MIDI format so that you can use ur music for many other activities in your digital life.