From Arab to Roman

[Themfu]

After posting my Nashville request above yesterday, I discovered that over the past two years many comments have already been posted about how difficult it would be for irb to algorithmically determine the correct Nashville number for a given chord. That is true, and as someone else mentioned sometimes there isn't even an agreed upon correct Nashville (or Roman numeral) number for a chord, because different people might differ about the harmonic function of that chord, so I might say it is a Nashville 2- (or Roman ii) in Key 1 and you might say it is a Nashville 4- (or Roman iv) in Key 2, etc.

But this dispute goes away if irb allows a user to explicitly say, anywhere in the piece, what new key the piece is modulating to. While on most pieces folks will agree, on some pieces some may disagree, but then they can simply "edit song" and change the new key designation, and voila they will get the Nashville numbers that they want to see.

If development of this functionality was stopped by the roadblock of how difficult it is for the computer to determine the "right" harmonic function of a chord (which is a difficult problem indeed), then the good news is that we can side step that whole issue by allowing the user to say what the new key is. I think this is a simple and elegant solution that works for 98% of the pieces, and for the other 2% folks can click a few buttons and change the key to what they think it should be and everyone will be happy.

Norman, thanks for posting your nmn version of Tune Up. For some reason the link doesn't load correctly in the web editor (other songs load fine) so I will have to try it from home on the ipad.

Here's hoping for a next version of the Nashville functionality!!!
BB in San Fran USA