Music artifact field-note

Thinking in Layers

A mental model for jazz piano harmony built on superimposition — an underlying function, a structure placed above it, and the resulting color — taught through one fixed progression with playable, inline notation.

Thinking in Layers teaches modern jazz piano harmony as superimposition: an underlying chord that tells you where you are, and a structure placed above it that tells you what you want that harmony to sound like. Every idea is built through one fixed laboratory progression, Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7, so the ear learns to attribute each new sound to the layer that produced it.

Every worked example is also a playable music sheet — authored as ABC notation, rendered to a real grand staff in the browser, and played back through a Web Audio synth, with a Play button right under the passage being explained.

github.com/alessandrobessi/thinking-in-layers · read it