Chord Dissonances
Hi Everyone,
Okay, I know this may have been discussed in other threads, but I'm interested in finding a way of identifying the dissonances in a particular chord. I know there is a Chord Identifier plug-in but that seems to only identify what the chords are, not what they should be or what they right notes should be. My pieces, mostly choral pieces, seem to have a number of dissonances in them and I would like to have some objective, non-theoretical way of having them highlighted. I know the subject of what is dissonant is a complex one, so this would be according to standard practice. If MuseScore doesn't have a feature or plug-in for this, could someone suggest a software program that might give me these results? Or is a feature like this simply impossible given the complexities of music theory?
Thanks very much for any help on this.
David
Comments
"Dissonance" is a highly subjective and very context-dependent concept, even according to
"standard practice". That is, there are places where perfect fourths are OK, other places where they aren't, same for perfect fifths, same for minor sevenths, same for tritones, and so on. So no, it would not generally be possible to write a program to identify dissonances in a really objective sense. But if you want to get a lot more specific - saying which intervals you personally are concerned about and the contexts in which you might find a given interval dissonant versus not, etc - it would in theory be possible to write a plugin for that. Or, more likely, someone might write a program in something like music21 to do this sort of analysis.