Representation of Harmonies on the Harmonic Wheel

The Tonnetz is a useful tool for representing musical excerpts or full pieces containing mainly major and minor triads. However, when a musical composition contains dissonant triads or higher-order chords, it can only give a limited representation of it. The Harmonic Wheel is a physical tool that combines a Tonnetz transformed into a polar grid with a plastic disc containing the lines that define the major, harmonic and melodic minor scales, together with the scale degrees and the symbols of the corresponding seventh chords. This way, it allows to represent a large variety of musical works, including both triads and seventh chords, as well as to find the chords that are common to different keys. To show its main characteristics and advantages, several examples are given from different musical styles. In all cases, the representations obtained are simple and compact, and therefore easy to memorize, which makes the Harmonic Wheel a powerful and versatile tool for analyzing and composing music, as well as providing an efficient mnemonic notation