Anotona · About
About Anotona
Who makes this site, how its content is produced, and how what it says is checked.
What Anotona is
A reference for musicians, with tools: chords with fingerings for piano, guitar and ukulele, scales, intervals, keys, chord progressions and music notation symbol by symbol — plus a tuner, a metronome, a circle of fifths and a transposer that run in the browser. Around 70,000 pages in 100 languages, free and without an account. anotona.com belongs to the app of the same name, which turns a photographed sheet of music into engraved notation.
Who is behind it
Anotona is run by LGA International GmbH in Stuttgart, Germany (legal notice). We are a small team that reads music and practises pieces ourselves — and has been annoyed often enough by chord diagrams on the web that were copied wrongly. That is why nothing here is typed in by hand.
How the content is made
Every note is computed. Chords and scales follow their rules (which is why F-sharp major has an E-sharp, not an F), fingerings are derived from tuning and fret, and before any fingering goes on a page we recompute which notes it actually sounds. Notation images are engraved with Verovio from MusicXML; the sound you hear next to them is rendered from the same file, not taken from a recording. The pieces are public-domain settings from the Mutopia Project and the Open Hymnal Project; the instrument sounds come from the freely licensed GeneralUser GS sound set.
How it is checked
Before every release, more than 110 automated checks run. They do not ask whether a page looks nice but whether it is right: whether every fingering yields the chord the heading names; whether the duration of a triplet, computed back from the sound, is correct; whether the image next to “fermata” actually shows one; whether a note name in the text is the same one the notation image prints; whether a translation contains a character from a foreign script. And every check has a counter-test proving that it fires when something is wrong — a check that never fires looks exactly like one that finds nothing.
A hundred languages
The pages were written in German and English. The other 98 versions we wrote with the help of language models and secured with our own checks: placeholders, note names, writing systems, punctuation, capitalisation at the start of a sentence. The terminology of all 100 languages is published as an open dataset with a DOI on Zenodo (the study, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23173566). If you find a mistake in your language, write to us — one e-mail is enough.
What Anotona does not do
No account, no cookies, no tracking across devices. How many people read the pages we count with our own cookie-free measurement (privacy).
Contact
Anotona does this for you
Photograph a page of sheet music or play the melody — Anotona finds the key, engraves the notes and transposes them into any other. Free.
See AnotonaEvery note on this page is computed, not typed in — following the rule that also makes F# major spell its seventh degree E#, not F.