When I'm soloing I want to know what the "new" notes are as the chords change: notes that the listener hasn't heard lately or at all (in this song). That's the idea. I may explore other ideas once I have the basic mechanics working.

I was inspired by Bob Keller's "How to Key-Map a Tune", which brings Excel spreadsheets into the jazz (why not?). This approach is a much more conventional jazz theory (and probably better) approach. If you are learning jazz theory, start there.

Example

In this one, we see "new" notes in green, and repeated notes in gray:

I see this as a tool for analysis, not any sort of real-time usage.

For me, this is more interesting on a song that confounds me a bit, like Dolphin Dance. I still haven't quite figured out how to bring coherence to the chords:

Future

Right now, you enter chords yourself. I went this route hunting around for existing libraries and not finding anything that would work well. I can imagine a way to paste in a whole tune.

I wonder if doing a gradient of how popular a note is might be interesting.

Credits

• uses a library called vexflow for rendering the notes and staves.
• uses a library called chord-symbol to translate chord symbols to notes.