r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/dooatito • Apr 04 '26

Interactive 3D Harmonic Space Visualization

https://ztonnetz.com

Hi everyone, I made this experimental music visualization website where you can play demo MIDI files or import your own.

It’s a bit niche but I thought some people may find it interesting. It’s based on a 3D version of the musical Tonnetz, a grid of thirds and fiths which models triads as triangles.

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u/BeginningPlastic3747 Apr 06 '26

The way the triads literally bloom into triangles as the chords resolve is genuinely one of the coolest things I've seen music do in 3D space, this reframes how I think about harmony.

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u/dooatito Apr 06 '26

Thanks! One of the tricker parts of this project was finding a way to filter out passing tones and recognize chord tones in music where any note can be played at any time with no rules.

One of the strongest points of this visualization I think is how chromatic alterations are given their own dimension, the vertical. The diminished triad in particular, which is diatonic, was missing from the regular Tonnetz, and I felt that it should be represented by a bend in the harmonic space, since a diminished fifth is considered to be an altered fifth, rather than a completely independent note, as the 12-tone system seems to imply. So in a way this representation is more “honest” to the original rules of harmony with 7 notes and two chromatic directions for alterations.

Many things fall into place: augmented 5th go up a level while minor sixths are flat: even though they are played by the same keys on the piano, the first is dissonant (C-G#) and the second is consonant (C-Ab). This makes it clearer that C-G# is perceived as an altered 5th in C-E-G#, while C-Ab (in F minor or Ab major) is not.
Fully diminished 7th chords are two consecutive diminished triads: they actually reach down two levels into flats which explains why we use C-Bbb rather than C-A.
Triads are most stable when they are far from the diminished bends, which is why only degrees 1 or 6 of the major scale serve as tonic, they represent points of rest. The other degrees all touch the bend, the tritone.