Coltrane VS tonal

https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane Has gotten me thinking about AI for teaching music theory, but I really don't think it is there yet, music theory is far to fuzzy for AI right now. I do think there are niches where it could be quite great, it could absolutely do well in teaching much of counterpoint and classical forms, perhaps even the basics of harmony but it is hard to disentangle harmony from the fuzzy areas and I could see AI doing more damage than good there.

> because none of the commands work

The Readme had some outdated information. Explained better on the issue https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane/issues/56

> The chords for guitar also are weird. It doesn't seem to be using traditional shapes, but is looking for available notes within a fret range. Which leads to difficult, basically unusable fingerings.

That's a design choice on this library. I tried to rely the least as possible on lookup tables, dictionaries, etc, leaving things to be discovered algorithmically instead. It is a difficult challenge, but for example if someone decides to use an entirely different tuning, the software will provide. The software might also find chords that you have never thought about. What has to be improved here is the sorting mechanism for guitar chords.

> The other functions would be very useful to have, if it worked

Just try running `coltrane` and test it interactively.

There's this https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane

Coltrane music theory library on the command line

They're using objects, including arrays [1], so I think they would have been more precise to say that they're using objects and arrays as simple data structures rather than using OO features like inheritance and mutation.

[1] https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/blob/main/packages/chord/in...

It's not on this list, but it's a cool list to check out either way

I'm working on a music project and both tonejs and tonal are incredible projects.

Regarding the "Music Theory library" aspect, note that the CLI tool demonstrates use of the underlying Ruby library which has documentation here:

* https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane/wiki/Core-music-theory...

Additionally, the author wrote a post about the motivation for creating the library but it's a little difficult to find via the (now broken) link in the README, so here is a direct link to the archived page on the Wayback Machine:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20170714063625/https://medium.co...

If anyone is interested in a similar music theory library for Javascript[0] I've had some success with this:

* Tonal / Tonal.js https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal

[0] Or, in a pinch, even with a Godot 4 web export as I did for my (very incomplete) "AI and Games" Game Jam entry: https://rancidbacon.itch.io/the-conductor (For reasons far too convoluted to go into now.)

There are many hundreds of scale types, here's a list of many of them and that's just a single key. Let's say there's 200 scales times 12 for each key, that's 2400 times up and down the piano. There are actually much more than 200 scales though!

I found a module that is perfect for what I'm trying to create, (a simple piano that you can select keys on to find out which chord it gives), and am trying to use https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal .

Agree with the representation, you can really bury yourself in complexity if you're not careful. Have you taken a look at any of the JS libraries like tonal or MusicTheoryJS?

Here's how tonal.js does it: https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/tree/master/packages

For the music theory stuff I'm using TonalJS along with my own extensions