Chord Readout

A composite card puts a readable chord symbol first, followed by supporting detail in order of how often you need it: note names and raw set encoding, Forte set class, interval-vector chart, and self-consonance meter. The order is deliberate. The symbol answers “what am I playing?”, the question asked most often. The details answer “why does it sound like that?”, which comes up less often but deserves a full answer. The two halves draw on different traditions. The chord name uses tonal thinking, with roots, qualities and inversions; the set class uses atonal thinking, with no root and only interval content. A major and minor triad therefore have the same shape reflected. Seeing both at once reveals the structure of a sonority reached by ear. Chord naming has no dependencies: a ranked search over a quality dictionary reads inversions from the bass note and reports runners-up rather than pretending an ambiguous chord has one answer.