Chords, Diatonic Harmony and Voicing

This module builds toward the bread-and-butter task of a live coder or electronic producer: writing an 8-bar pad progression that sounds intentional rather than block-chorded. In a deep house or ambient set, the pad is the harmonic bed everything else sits on — and what separates a warm, flowing pad from a stiff one is not the chord names but the voicing: which note is on top, how the voices move between changes, and where the sevenths and extensions sit.

The arc starts fully supported. You begin by drilling raw material to automaticity — stacking thirds into major, minor, diminished and augmented triads, then extending them with sevenths (the semitone rules for each type are your JIT reference). Next you derive the full diatonic chord set of your chosen key, so every chord choice in the capstone comes from a closed, functional system rather than guesswork. The middle exercises are guided voicing studies: re-spelling a fixed progression through inversions, then applying octave displacement so the top voice steps rather than leaps — the “melody emerging from the chords” move. The capstone strips the scaffolding: you pick the key, the progression, and the voicing strategy, and render the result as a playable pad.

Every required atom gates that outcome: you cannot voice a stepwise top line without inversion and voice-leading concepts, cannot pick chords without the diatonic set (major and minor), and cannot meet the seventh/extended requirement without the construction rules; parallel harmony gives you the deliberate contrast case for the target sound. Supporting atoms enrich rather than gate — minor-ninth colour, deep house’s seventh-chord idiom, mix-friendly chord reduction, and arpeggiation as an alternative presentation of the same harmony.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

drone

osc 55 >> audio

_{punctual-0001 · CC0-1.0}

SinOsc s => dac;

_{chuck-0001 · MIT}

chord-stab

chord("<Cm7 Fm7>").voicing()

_{strudel-0010 · CC0}

~stab: mix ~n1 ~n2 ~n3 >> mul ~env

_{glicol-0015 · MIT}

arpeggio

n("0 2 4").scale("c:minor").arp("up")

_{strudel-0012 · CC0}

d1 $ arp "up" $ n "c'min7" # sound "superpiano"

_{tidal-0012 · CC0}

scale-constraint

n("0 2 4 6").scale("c:minor")

_{strudel-0009 · CC0}

play (scale :c4, :minor).tick; sleep 0.25

_{sonicpi-0012 · CC0}

chord-progression

play_chord progression.tick, release: 4, amp: 0.5; sleep 4

_{sonicpi-0017 · CC0}

Pbind(\degree, Pseq([[0, 2, 4], [3, 5, 7], [4, 6, 8], [0, 2, 4]], 1), \dur, 2).play

_{supercollider-0031 · CC0}

motif-development

d1 $ n (run 8) # sound "arpy" # room 0.3

_{tidal-0043 · CC0}

play (scale :e3, :minor_pentatonic).tick + (ring 0, 12, 7).look; sleep 0.25

_{sonicpi-0021 · CC0}

chord-extension

[60,63,67,70] @=> int ch[]; SawOsc s => ADSR e => dac; e.set(2::ms,120::ms,0,2::ms);
for(0=>int i;i<ch.size();i++){ Std.mtof(ch[i]) => s.freq; e.keyOn(); 150::ms => now; }

_{chuck-0035 · MIT}