Some usability issues

feature requests
1

A few issues I have arrived at after using the chord database for a while:

  1. At the right hand side of a TheoryTab page, other songs from the same artist are listed, but when there are too many songs of the artist from the database, only the top five songs in alphabetical order are displayed. It would make more sense to pick randomized songs from the artist so that users do not always see the same songs (this also goes for each artist’s individual song listing page).
  2. TheoryTab creators should be able to rename their own contributions, change the part labels corresponding to their TheoryTabs, and delete their public TheoryTabs. I am saying “creators” because the database may otherwise suffer from vandalism, but all users should eventually be able to carry out these operations if and once Hooktheory has an active team of moderators just like Wikipedia.
  3. Users should be able to edit their existing TheoryTab comment if they were the last one modifying that TheoryTab in the database, and such edit should not update the Newest Comments section.
  4. It seems that TheoryTabs containing supermode chords have no difficulty associated with them, and it also seems that while the borrowed chords V, and #viø7 in minor key are automatically recognized as applied chords, others like I (Picardy third) and IV6 will immediately cause the difficulty icons to vanish? I do not think the 6 difficulties as described on the database page could encompass some of these more common chord progressions and I also believe that these difficulties do not accurately represent the complexity of the TheoryTabs.

I look forward to a reply from the Hooktheory staff. Thanks in advance.

2

Thanks for your comments.

  1. This is a great suggestion. I think we can probably plan on implementing this in the next site update.

  2. This is also great input. Eventually we would love to have a team of Hooktheory users that are willing to moderate the database. Until then we are still discussing internally the best way to handle this. Having contributors moderate their own tabs is certainly a reasonable option.

  3. This is seems like a reasonable request, and we will consider it for the next update.

  4. The chord progression complexity rating is a new feature that is continuing to evolve. As you can imagine, it is difficult to ascertain the true complexity of a song simply by looking at the chords in its chord progression; some borrowed chords for instance are not very complex, whereas others can be quite exotic. The Hooktheory team feels that the current breakdown, while not perfect, is a good start. If you have specific suggestions on how to improve this breakdown, we would love to hear them. Chords causing the difficulty icons to vanish is a bug, and we will address this in a future update.

Best regards,
Ryan