Fine Tuning Interpretation

How to allow more dissonance and free wheeling harmony

There are several ways to tweak and influence voice leading process.

Allowing More Dissonance

The Voice Leading process (VL) ensures that melodic movements are preserved no matter what happens to Harmony or how narrow the current Playing Range may be. Depending on the strategy you selected, it also takes care that chord changes are emphasized by melody where possible.

While transposing figure symbols in the phrase editor, you might notice that certain pitches are avoided. This is because VL excludes them for various reasons. If you feel a specific pitch should absolutely be allowed, you can do one of the following to relax VL constraints.

Choose a Different Scale: Your Vertical Scale may be too tame. Try a more dissonant one.
Insert an Intermediate Chord: If you have a specific melody in your head for which VL is not allowing individual pitches to be placed, this is probably because the chord in your head is different from the one in the progression at that point in time. Try adding intermediate chords or doubling the pace of your progression. Fast chord changes are not necessarily perceived as such, while they extend the scale material allowed for melodies.
Add Chord Extensions: Since the Vertical Scale is responsible for the set of allowed pitches, adding extensions to a chord makes sure these notes are more likely to be allowed. Still, some strategies allow only the strongest chord intervals to be used at rhythmically important places, excluding some chord extensions.
Allow Minor Seconds: Check Enable Dissonance on the Form tab. This will allow the minor seconds in some chord inversions to be played. This however only affects Chord segments.
Disable Cooperation: Disable the Cooperative mode.
Select a Different Strategy: Select a more relaxed VL strategy from the pop-up menu.
Disable Voice Leading: Disable VL for the individual Figure segment.
Allow Chromatic Alterations: In addition to disabling VL, also allow chromatic alterations for the individual Figure segment. This is really only a last resort, as it makes your phrase somewhat hard-wired to the current Harmony. It won't adapt well anymore when you move it to another place.