harmonimation

A program for visualizing music theory from sheet music transcriptions.

Mission: Empower music educators, YouTubers, or hobbyists with tools to quickly generate and share stylistic animations of songs or music concepts.

Demo ():

Inspiration ():

Interested to chat about music or follow along with development? Join my community Discord: https://discord.gg/bseuGuKaZg

Features

Currently:

• Music animation widgets created with manim, the animation engine powering 3Blue1Brown's math videos on YouTube
  • Circle of 12 notes (arranged in both chromatic and Circle of 5ths)
    • Connectors to visualize harmonic progressions
    • Rotate during key changes
  • Rhthm circle to visualize note timing within a measure
  • Animated text for Key, Chord, and user notes
  • Lyric text with syllable highlighting
• Programmatic parsing of sheet music from .musicxml using music21 library
  • Automatic chord inference (can write in chords if not correct)
  • Lyric timing
• Declarative layout config file for all music widgets and parsing behaviors

Planned for future:

• Improvements to existing music widgets:
  • 12-note music circle
    • Diatonic radials / pitch highlighting to emphasize in/out of key
    • Showing all individual notes outside of main ring
    • Add chord symbols for jazz chord extensions
    • Show all current chord tones, not just root
  • Rhythm circle
    • Showing all individual notes outside of main ring
• More music widgets:
  • Piano roll
  • Frequency spectrograms / graphs
  • Sheet music with playhead
  • Song structure/sections
  • Vocal register
  • Embedding other videos like music video
  • Tonnetz lattice
• Layout/Behavior config file improvements:
  • Variable BPM
  • Support other config formats like YAML / KDL
• Docker image for rendering harmonimation without any local install

Early design

Local install

Not reliably proven, many need to fix your own setup issues.

Prerequisites:

1. ffmpeg
   • on mac, I've used brew install ffmpeg
2. uv: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

Installation steps:

1. Clone this project
2. Run uv sync
3. Activate the .venv and/or select its interpreter in your IDE
4. Install a LaTeX distro and the following packages on top of manim's guidance: musicography musixtex-fonts stackengine newunicodechar
   • see https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/installation/uv.html#step-2-optional-installing-latex
   • I tried to install TinyTeX on mac but I ran into issues with dvisvgm and missing files, do not recommend

Other issues:

• On mac, I also needed to brew install pkgconf to get pycairo to install currectly during uv sync.
• For some reason, I needed to manually make the media/Tex folder necessary for manim to create WIP LaTeX images.