Hi David,

Is there an IFR app for reading standard music notation and showing it with the IFR tonal numbers?

Thanks,
Jonathan

David’s response:

Hi Jonathan,

We get this question a lot. It’s certainly tempting to create an app that would take any song and turn it into a beautiful IFR tonal sketch, representing both the melody and the chords in tonal numbers.

Here’s why we won’t create an app like this. IFR is 100% designed around human beings. IFR is not a notation system. It’s a learning system. Our mission is to teach YOU how to understand those songs and express them in tonal numbers yourself. We’ll certainly publish lots of examples to help you learn this ability. But we don’t want to become just another source of written instructions for you to follow. What we want is to free you from all of those written instructions, so you can play from your imagination!

In other words, the IFR method isn't complete without YOU. We don’t really care about analyzing songs. What we care about is your growth as a musical artist. So instead of looking for an app to save you the trouble of analyzing songs, I encourage you to put yourself in the center of the process. Focus on your own learning, and search for the musical lessons that you can learn in every song you come across. Make it your goal to understand harmony so deeply that you don’t even need an app to analyze songs, because just by listening to the song you can instantly hear how it works.

This is exactly what your IFR practice will give you. And while IFR is definitely an awesome tool for analyzing songs, its real purpose is to help you grow in your own understanding and mastery of harmony. So that’s always where I would encourage you to focus, because that’s where the real treasure is.

Thanks for the great question,
David