Vision: AI Assistant for Harmonic Analysis and Counterpoint in Dorico
Here’s a draft vision for an AI-based assistant integrated into Dorico that goes beyond traditional proofreading.
Not just checking notation rules, but interpreting the score musically — harmony, counterpoint, voice-leading, register, and spacing.
A tool designed especially for final checks before publication, with awareness of:
harmony and harmonic continuity
counterpoint and voice-leading
register, spacing, and balance
visual clarity and how musical structure is communicated on the page
The goal isn’t to replace the composer —
but to act as a musical proofreader and second pair of eyes inside Dorico.
This is a vision for implementation at a later stage, but it may already be useful when considering the direction of future development for Dorico’s proofreading tools.
I think that’s a very good idea. I’m an amateur composer/arranger, and recently I hired a teacher who reviewed my work and gave me lots of tips and suggestions. Unfortunately, that course is now over, and I really miss those suggestions. Recently, I uploaded one of my arrangements as a PDF to Google Gemini and asked what I could improve. From my amateur perspective, I got some pretty good points out of this. How much more could a specialized AI in Dorico deliver!
there was a massive thread about checking things like parallel fifths and octaves a while back. I was among many who don’t myself want such a tool. We all have different ideas about to what degree formal analysis can help in composing (in my case not at all) but having said that, my main concern would be it could slow Dorico right down.
I don’t really see this as an extension of proof-reading, though. Proof reading is designed to improve the readability of the score and most of its suggestions are eminently sensible. Specific practical things like unplayable notes are also fine. But it’s a different thing trying to apply analytical theory which many composers pay no attention to nowadays anyway. Still, there may be grey areas here and I wouldn’t want to get in the way of something which had widespread support providing it doesn’t take development time away from the many things still to be sorted out and. doesn’t negatively impact on system performance.
For one thing, imaging an AI proofreading assistant that understands your choices. Like when you discard one proofreading flag, it would askyou if you want to discard all similar flags, or look closer at corner-cases.
my understanding is that the previous comment was only to remember your choices about the kind of proofreading you clearly don’t want. We’re not discussing analytical tools here – indeed one of my own worries about this sort of thing is indeed that it might encourage the sort of formulaic composing I see far too much of in commercial music.
I’ll bet there’s plenty of Doricians who could use such a tool – not the professional composers and engravers, but students and less experienced users. Each time an amateur composer has something flagged, hopefully they’ll learn something to avoid the hassle of “fixing mistakes”, and choose whether to implement it.
This would also make it attractive for students to use Dorico. The more users, the better for all of us. Hopefully it would work in the free version to attract new people.
Maybe such functionalities would be useful for beginners who are not fluent with music theory indeed. In any case, the best proofreader is to listen to the audio rendering. The most important is that it sounds great according to my personal taste. I took years of harmony and counterpoint theory lessons, so I am quite proficient in these matters, but to my view theory never helped me to write music. I think theory is there to understand why some chords progression, voice leading or countermelodies do not sound great and theory helps you to identify which voice and notes create the issue and how to fix that easily. So functions that can highlights issues could indeed help beginners to quickly fix some issues.