The song strip figure

The song strip is Bard's picture of a phrase: where the melody went, what was sounding under it, and what each note is against that — and it refuses to show anything else. It is the figure of Songwriting basics, where each of the five habits is two or three strips that differ in one thing, and it opens Why the major modes.

What it shows

Time runs left to right, a bar a column. Above each bar, in a lane of its own, is the chord's numeral — I, IV, V, vi — a fact about the bar, so it sits beside the drawing rather than on it.

Pitch runs up the strip on linear rows, one a semitone, so a leap looks like a leap and a note outside the key is visibly off the lit rows. The rows are shared across the tiles of a cue and cover at least an octave, so two strips are compared without either being rescaled.

The chord under each bar lights its tones' rows in the degree color counted from the key — the same twelve colors as everywhere on the site, but counted from the key's root, not the chord's. A IV chord lights the rows of 4, 6 and 1; a V lights 5, 7 and 2. That is harmony seen moving through a key: the lit rows shift bar by bar, and the melody either lands on them or doesn't.

The tune is a line that holds and glides — flat where a note sounds, sloping where it moves — traced through the rows. Every note wide enough to carry one gets a degree on it, the app's glyph, counted from the key: a fact about the note, so on the note.

Read a strip by asking the three questions in order: where did the line go, what was lit under it, and are the notes it rests on lit or not.

The tiles

A cue is two or three strips stacked. They share their chords, their rhythm and their seed and differ in one thing — chord tones or not, step or leap, on the pulse or off it, a key or none — because a contrast is only readable when it is attributable to one cause.

Nothing in a strip is authored. Every tile is a draw from Bard's own melody engine under the cue's rule; if the app stopped writing lines that fit the claim, the figure would stop showing them, which is the right way for it to fail. A seed is an address: the same seed draws the same phrase, and the address of the page carries it (#rests=7.1). Arrive without one and you get a fresh draw, so the same phrasing is never what everyone sees.

What you can do

• Tap a tile and it plays — the chords on a classical guitar, the tune on a piano — and keeps playing round. At every lap the sounding tile is drawn again: the same rhythm and chords with the pitches rolled anew, or, in the chords cue, new chords. The other tiles stay as they were, so the picture that changed is the one you can hear. A playhead sweeps the bar and the line inks itself behind it.
• Tap the sounding tile to stop it; tap another to switch. What it last drew stays on the page.
• ↻ starts over from a new draw of every tile.

The grid and the shape-of-a-song figures on the same page are not strips — they have no pitch in them, and are gray for that reason.

Where it appears

Four of the six figures of Songwriting basics; the opening of Why the major modes: one phrase drawn twice, from all twelve notes over chords from nowhere and from seven notes over their own chords; and near the end of Notes, intervals and scales: one phrase in C and in G, labeled by name and then by number — the names all change, the numbers read the same.