Jazz Chord Identification Toolkit

This is an open-source jazz chord identification system, which aggregates the advantages of music21, mingus and scales-chords.com.

Related Wheels

Up to 06/Jun/2022:

• mingus (0.6.1): https://bspaans.github.io/python-mingus/
• music21 (7.1.0): https://web.mit.edu/music21/doc/index.html
• pychord (1.0.0): https://github.com/yuma-m/pychord
• scales-chord.com: https://www.scales-chords.com/chordid.php

Features

Human-preference-aware

Jazz chord naming is a logical task. It seems that this task could be done automatically with a set of simple rules. However, this is not the case. The namings of chords are subjective, and there are many preferences of musicians on chord naming. This warns: even if the naming from an automatic chord identification system is technically correct, it may not be the desired one. Here are several examples:

• Example 1: given a chord [C,E,A,B,D], a jazz musician will give in a second that it is a C-sixth-ninth chord; here are the performances of the existing wheels:

  • mingus: ['Esus47|CM6']
  • music21: ('Am/CaddB,D', 'minor')
  • pychord: []
  • scales-chord.com: No chord found

• Example 2: given a chord [C,E,B,D], a jazz musician will give in a second that it is a C-major-ninth chord; here are the performances of the existing wheels:

  • mingus: ['Em7|CM7']
  • music21: ('CM9', 'major-ninth')
  • pychord: []
  • scales-chord.com: Cmaj9

Our system is tailored on the chord naming preferences of jazz musicians. It takes account of every commonly/less-commonly used chords, at the same time avoiding overly complex naming.

Super-fast

Our system is 30 times faster than music21. Although 3 times slower than mingus and 8 times slower than pychord, our system is more powerful than mingus and pychord.

Open-source

Although scales-chord.com outperforms music21,mingus and pychord on chord vocabulary and accuracy, it is not open-source. Our project is free of use for everyone under licenses.