Why Harmonization ? - Importance of harmonizing a melody

One of the biggest problem in song writing or piano playing (o creating your own music) is the problem of harmonization. In this blog I discuss why harmonization is crucial (getting the right chords to the right notes) and how we can overcome this problem using and interactive tool called ChordATune.

Power of harmonization
Play Melody
Play Harmonized Melody


Music is made out of melody and harmony. Melody is the basic tune of a song (which we can easily hum o we can just guess the notes using a keyboard). Harmony on the other hand is the accompaniments to a melody (base chords, drumbeats ect) which makes your song complete. Harmonization is a crucial part in song writing o piano playing because only by harmonization you can make your melody rich and power and also add emotions and color to your song. However, many people face the problem of harmonizing because you need extensive knowledge in music, years of training and practice and also some musicality in you to harmonize a song accurately.

This is where the ChordATune comes in handy... ChordATune is a powerful harmonization tool. Not only just harmonization, you can also create your own melodies the way you want (using a virtual piano or manuscript editor) and make it complete by harmonization. ChordATune let user have variety of harmonies according users emotions and styles and also provide drum beats to make your song have a rocking beat!!.ChordATune output the harmonize melody in manuscript and midi formats. ChordATune also provides a feature of guitar players where they can get guitar chords in guitar tabular format for an any given tune.

Now you can create your own music the way you want and also ChordATune provides a mechanism to save your creations in MIDI format so that you can use ur music for many other activities in your digital life.

Harmony and Melody and Rythem

Music is made out of three basic elements as melody, harmony and rythem. Melody is a group of notes played one after the other (monophonic), it is the basic tune of a song which can be hummed. (Jones, 2007). Harmony is a series of notes in combination (chords) which will be played simultaneously and can completely change the mood of the music. Rhythm is the beat of the music. Jesse Gress claims rhythm is the bonding agent that allows musical pitches to be organized in time. He further stated that rhythm can exsist without melody but melody cannot exsist without a rythem (Gress, 2001). Therefore it is essential to have a rythem in melody. Victor Zuckerkandl author of the book Sense of Music claims that melody can be defined melody as horizontal aspect of music and harmony, comprising of blocks of tones or chords that makes up the vertical aspect in music (Zuckerkandl, 1971).

MacPherson and Hunt state that melody is one of the prime factors in determining the choice of chords. Further they state that harmony must be used to fit the tune for a melody to be colourful (MacPherson & Hunt, 2003). On the other hand Cynthia explains that harmonic music consists of two or more notes played simultaneously. When three or more tones are sounded together, a chord is produced (Cynthia, 2001) therefore movement of chords can be represented the harmony which makes the music pollyphonic.

The evidence above suggests that melody is the basic tune of a song which is superimposed over a specific rhythm and harmony on the other hand harmony makes the melody rich and colorful by adding variations and moods. This further indicates that harmony strongly depends on its melody and harmonizing can vary according to the composer’s moods. Therefore one song can have more than one harmony and a harmony depends on the composer’s preference.