An audio file
Load a track and scrub it. Deterministic, repeatable, and the fastest way to check whether it hears what you hear.
Harmony Lab hears music — an audio file, your microphone, or the instrument plugged into your interface — and shows the key, the chords, and the notes that will work over them, while it is still playing.
Free forever for the live analysis, the pathways and every instrument view. No account needed to play. Access is by invitation while v1 is finished — mail me and I will add you.
The Play screen, running. Every colour on it means something musical — the chrome spends none.
There is a long stretch between playing some chords and hearing where a song wants to go. It lasts years for most people, and the reason is that the feedback is slow: you play something, it sounds wrong, and nothing tells you why — or what to reach for instead — while your hands are still on the instrument.
Chord detectors label what is playing. That is the easy half, and it is close to free now. None of them answer the question you are actually asking: given what I just heard, what can I play, and how will it feel?
Detection without direction is a dictionary with no sentences.
The board is not a scale diagram with the current chord highlighted. It is a map of a key with an equator running through it: below the line the major side sits under your pinky, above it the same shape sits under your index and turns minor. Learn one shape and you have both tonalities and every position on the neck.
Every dot is computed from the scale in the key the app is hearing — not a stored fingering chart. Change key and the whole board moves.
Chord tones — every note of the sounding chord, wherever it falls under your hand.
Reading a chart means looking ahead and losing your place. Horizon does the looking for you: the song flows right to left toward a fixed NOW line, so what is sounding is always in the same spot on screen and what is coming is already in view — with the fingering for it drawn above the lane, not two bars away on a page.
Chord blocks are coloured by what they are doing in the key, not by what they are called. A borrowed chord stays neutral rather than being forced into a function it does not have.
Five subjects run side by side — intervals, chords, scales, progressions, ear — and each is revisited at four rising levels of depth rather than finished once and abandoned. You meet the major scale in your first hour and again, differently, at the top; you meet triads before seventh chords, because the second is unplayable without the first.
Every lesson is graded by what you play — on a MIDI keyboard, or a guitar into an interface — not by which button you press. A lesson you abandon halfway earns nothing: no points, no streak, on purpose.
Interval size, your first triads, the major and natural-minor scales, and the diatonic chords they generate — the first rung of all five strands.
Quality and motion — the dominant 7th and altered triads with the restless tritone, the minor-scale colours, cadences, and harmonic function.
Real harmony in play — the seventh-chord family and its inversions, pentatonics and blues, ii–V–I and the pop axis.
The far reaches — chord extensions, the modes, secondary dominants, and functional listening.
A short listening and playing test drops you in at the right rung on each of the five strands. You are never made to start from the bottom of a subject you already know.
The analysis — resampling, the transform, chord and key inference, the pathways — happens in workers on your own machine, in the app you launched. There is no server in that loop, and no recording or live input is ever uploaded.
Load a track and scrub it. Deterministic, repeatable, and the fastest way to check whether it hears what you hear.
Play a guitar, a keyboard, or sing. The analysis runs on what you are doing right now, not on a recording of it.
Capture the system output or a browser tab and improvise over it. Only the sound is analysed; the picture is discarded.
Hearing the key, the chords and the pathways is the whole point of the thing, and gating it would make the product worse for everyone — including the people who pay. Nothing here is ever metered by the song, the minute or the analysis.
Everything that listens, everything that draws.
One licence, every surface — web, Mac and Windows. Not per platform.
Pro opens with v1, with a 14-day trial and no card. It unlocks features, never your own work: if you stop paying the app drops to Free rather than locking, and every song you made stays openable and exportable forever.
Point it at a song you have never worked out and see how far you get. Access is by invitation while v1 is finished — tell me what you play and I will send you in.
MACOS 12+ · WINDOWS 10+ · CHROME, EDGE, SAFARI