Reviews: Mindful Harmony

Mindful Harmony is an app for composers, songwriters and those who wish to improve their music theory through practical use of the circle of fifths. The basic app is available for free, but for $5.99 (around £4.76) per month you can upgrade to Premium, which gives you access to a greater selection of harmonic possibilities and a modulation generator that will suggest chord possibilities to help change keys.

I am always sceptical of the true value of an app versus pencil and manuscript, but, for those who share my misgivings, let us embrace the age we are in: this is a powerful tool that pupils will be able to explore easily from their devices. It might just help them to unlock creativity that they couldn’t quite access before.

Upon opening the app, you are presented with a circle of fifths and a space to create your composition. It is very easy to add a chord. You can select a key and then choose from all chord possibilities within that parameter. This includes all possible extensions, alterations and substitute chords. You can choose the voicing, select inversions and change the root note of the chord. You can also hear each chord by clicking on it before choosing to add it to your composition. The modulation generator will give you suggested sequences to take you from one chosen key to the next. When hovering over the more complex chords, a brief description of its use pops up, which is a neat addition. For example, linger over a tritone substitution and it tells you which chord this would resolve to.

The ability to download your chord sequence as text and to export this as a MIDI file are very welcome. This means that you can easily load your sequence into a DAW and start to develop it into a full composition. In the classroom, Mindful Harmony can therefore sit alongside notation software and DAW as an additional point of reference. It might be of particular interest to those working on music technology projects or those who might have followed less traditional routes of theoretical learning.

I work with a number of young songwriters who have reached a good level on their instrument and have begun writing melodies and lyrics; they really struggle, though, to develop a meaningful and, more importantly, functional chord sequence. This app is perfect for this type of pupil who may wish to learn more about chords. Non-chord based instrumentalists and vocalists will absolutely love this!

One question I pondered was ‘is this cheating?’. I don’t think so. It is impossible to make headway with a chord sequence without developing knowledge through experimentation or indeed having some knowledge in the first place. If you try to add chords at random, the result is very similar to the result you would get if you did this without the app. Mindful Harmony simply gives music creators an additional tool so that more people can write down the music that is in their heads.

There is an unexpected bonus for music practice that I don’t think was intentional. I have found this to be a useful tool for use with my improvisation pupils in creating chord sequences and to hear chord/scale relationships in context. My musical education involved hitting a chord on the piano, holding down the sustain pedal and then grabbing my instrument so that I could quickly explore that sound world before it faded away. Mindful Harmony allows you to focus on one chord at a time and explore the melodic possibilities in a practical way. You can easily create a loop-able audio track with an enormous variety of chords. You could even input an existing composition in order to practice playing along with a reasonable-sounding accompaniment.

For an instrumental teacher and musician such as myself, this will complement my other carefully selected practice apps. For the classroom, this can unlock the potential of your pupils who are struggling to access the sound that is in their heads. I would recommend this to beginners and seasoned professionals alike.

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