Module talk:Infobox Chord
Order of fields in the infobox
It is important to me that the chord pages be accessible to beginners, and particularly to beginners who have some prior knowledge from outside of the Xen wiki — such as established literature on music theory, musical acoustics, the history of intonation, and so forth.
It is also important to me that the infobox emphasizes objective information about the chord: not to give the reader something more to memorize, but rather to help them organize and connect facts that they already know.
The established literature on just intonation, from Helmholtz / Ellis, to Partch, to Barbour (much as I dislike his tone), to more recent works by Doty, Haluska, Gann, Sethares, and others, overwhelmingly uses a few common forms: fractions (such as “3/2”) both relative to a root or tonic and as consecutive steps; enumerated harmonics (such as “4:5:6:7”); and cents (such as “696.7¢”). So I would like to start with the identity of the chord in those familiar, unambiguous terms.
We will probably eventually duplicate the “Category” of chord — the familiar but more subjective music theory terms that are currently featured in the introductory sentences — into the infobox. When that happens, that information should probably go right after the objective identity of the chord: it helps to orient the reader to the chord in well-established terms that they are likely to encounter both in Xenharmonic and microtonal literature, and in broader discussions of music theory in a more tuning-agnostic setting.
From there, we can branch out to information useful for specific practices. Prime limits and odd limits are relevant to those using Partch-style JI (referred to elsewhere on the wiki as “LCJI”). The factored Euler-Fokker genus is relevant both to those working in prime subgroups and those working specifically within the framework of genera.
Then the question is: where should the color names go? They are not found in very much of the established literature, nor in many of the video series I've seen analyzing microtonal theory; in terms of specificity, they're similar to odd limits and genera. From what I understand, color names are also somewhat ambiguous or subjective: they are currently not derived programmatically, and require a fairly substantial amount of memorization to convert back and forth from the more common representations, particularly for scale degrees with composite ratios.
Although I find the color names fairly idiosyncratic, I think they are similar in character to the conventional music theory “category” of the chord. I propose that they should go in the middle section, after the chord's objective identity in established terms but adjacent to the category.
That would give the order:
- Objective, established identities (as harmonics, subharmonics, interval and step ratios, and interval and step cents).
- Established “music theory” categories, if any: especially, names of the chord as given in multiple published sources.
- Color name, serving as the transition point between objective and established information and specialist or esoteric information.
- Then, other specialist categories: prime and odd limits, genera, etc.