Transpose diatonically from C one third lower should change C (major) chord symbols into Am (minor) chord symbols, not A (major)

• Jan 29, 2021 - 14:06
Reported version
3.6
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project

score with C chords, transpose diatonically generates A chords instead of Am


Comments

See attached score. First beat is entered, second one is copy/paste of first one followed by transpose diatonically 1 third lower. Problem is not in the notes but in the chord symbol.

Attachment Size
test.mscz 2.67 KB
Title transpose diatonically from C one third lower must change C chords in Am chords, not A Transpose diatonically from C one third lower must change C (major) chord symbols into Am (minor) chord symbols, not A (major)
Title Transpose diatonically from C one third lower must change C (major) chord symbols into Am (minor) chord symbols, not A (major) Transpose diatonically from C one third lower should change C (major) chord symbols into Am (minor) chord symbols, not A (major)
Severity S4 - Minor S5 - Suggestion

That's a pretty tall order to do in general, after all, the chords could be arbitrarily complex mixes of diatonic and non-diatonic notes, and we have no idea how you'd like to spell the newly construct chord (Ami? A-? Amin?).

But yes, it's certainly an interesting suggestion to consider for someday, probably along with other AI-ish enhancements like automatic identification etc.

What if you have an Eb major chord in the key of C major? It falls outside the realm of functional harmony, which makes it pretty attractive to Cardiacs fans.

We already have some sort of semantics defined for transposing individual notes that start outside the key, like what to do transposing Eb down a diatonic third in the key of C, with a checkbox to control whether we make preserve alterations - so, whether it becomes C or Cb. For a chord like Eb, we could apply that rule to each note - Eb G Bb becomes either C E G or Cb E Gb depending on the status of that checkbox. The first is of course just a C major chord. The second - that's kind of nonsense. And that's just a triad. Think about transposing a chord like Eb7b9sus and your head may explode trying to think about what happens to each pitch and what to call the end result.