和音
HWAEUM
Compose Korean traditional music.
Compose Korean traditional music.
Korean music uses five tones, not seven. The tone names are called yulmyeong, and the octave is written as bae (倍, low), nothing (middle), and cheong (淡, high). Here they are marked ⁻ and ⁺ so the names stay short inside a cell.
Pyeongjo (平調) Hwang Tae Jung Im Nam, clear and upright.
Gyemyeonjo (界面調) Hwang Hyeop Jung Im Mu, the second tone drops and a shadow falls.
Honestly, Korean traditional music has no harmony. Instruments play one melody together and each decorates it differently, which is heterophony, so notes that land at the same instant are a by-product rather than a chord anyone stacked on purpose. Functional harmony, tonic and dominant, does not exist here at all.
So stacking on this board is an adaptation rather than the tradition. What is true is that stacking five tones a row apart gives you far more 4ths than 3rds. A stack built only from 4ths is labelled a hollow sound and glows brass. That open, unfilled ring sits much closer to Korean sound than a triad does.
Chords are not named "major triad" either. The intervals that actually came out are written down as they are, for example "Hwang 4th · 4th".
Six voices are available. The bars show the partial structure a voice really produces. Scattered partials sound metallic, tightly descending ones sound like a string, and a single standing bar sounds pure.
Wind and crickets have no pitch, so they never go into a cell. They run underneath instead. Leave them on and the empty space stops feeling empty.
Horizontal is time, vertical is pitch.
Stack: three stones, one row apart, each in a different voice. With five tones
you will mostly get 4ths.
Melody: step into the next cell, one row up or down, in the same voice.
Tie: a stone in the same row of the next cell draws a brass line.
When two neighbouring chords share a tone, a dashed line runs along that row. Tails ring for
over three seconds, so a chord overlaps the one after it, and a shared tone makes that overlap
smooth. It is a reward, not a requirement.
There is no limit on how many stones a cell holds. Instead the thin bar in the cell head shows that cell's roughness. When tones crowd inside the band where the ear smears two of them into one (the critical band), the sound turns muddy. A reddening bar and a reddening cell mean you have stacked too much.
Low registers muddy faster than high ones. That is physics, which is why real arrangements space the bass out wide.
Korean music does not divide a bar evenly. Groups of three and two put the accents off the grid and the cycle walks with a limp. Cell count and accents change with every jangdan.
Jinyangjo 6 cells · 3+3 · slowest
Jungmori 12 cells · 3+3+3+3 · the pace of pansori
Semachi 9 cells · 3+3+3 · lively
Gutgeori 12 cells · 3+3+3+3 · flowing
Eotmori 10 cells · 3+2+3+2 · limping
Jajinmori 12 cells · 3+3+3+3 · driving
Every jangdan carries a plain pattern and a few variations. Turn Loop on and the pattern changes each time around. Hearing the same jangdan differently every cycle is closer to how it is really played.
The syllables in the cell heads say where and how the janggu is struck. Two letters each:
Dg deong, both heads · Ku kung, left head · Dk deok, right headSome beats carry several strokes. That beat is split evenly between them.
Press Listen with nothing on the board and you hear the janggu alone. Learning the jangdan first makes seating a piece on top of it much easier.
The patterns are simplified from real ones. Anyone who plays gugak will find plenty to correct.
One turn of a jangdan is one bar, and one bar is not a piece. So a piece is split into several parts, and each part takes a different jangdan.
Sanjo moves through Jinyangjo, Jungmori, Gutgeori, Jajinmori with the tempo rising the whole way, and Compose for me follows that arc. It starts slow and sparse, fills in, climbs a register, then comes back down to close.
The motif matters more. Four root tones are chosen for the whole piece first, and every part uses them as they are, an octave up, or reversed. Without repetition, no amount of length sounds like a piece.
Press a part to move to it. Press the same part again and its repeat count changes, and the drum pattern changes on every repeat. + adds a part, − deletes one.
It seats a chord on every accent, walks a melody through the weak beats, and hands back a whole piece. Since it only stacks five tones by the rule, a clashing chord cannot come out, and consecutive chords are picked to share at least one tone so the overlapping tails stay smooth. Voice combinations are chosen for the lowest roughness, and the final chord closes bright.
Starting here and fixing only the cells you dislike is easier than starting from an empty grid.
It marks the empty cells where the voice you have selected would sit well: places that complete a stack, carry a melody on, or make a tie, with muddy places left out. A solid outline is the best spot of all.
Space plays and stops · 1 to 6 pick a voice · C composes · R redoes this part · T shows spots · L loops · arrow keys move between parts · Esc closes this.