Seeing Music, Protecting a New Universal Language
When French composer and inventor Pierre Blaise Dionet plays the piano, he does not just hear notes. He sees shapes. Chords become triangles, stars, and trapezoids. Harmony appears as constellations on a circle of twelve notes. That unusual way of perceiving sound became the foundation of Synegram, a music edtech startup that wants to change how the world learns, understands, and creates music.
Synegram’s ambition is as simple as it is radical: to make music visual and logical for everyone, from young children to professional composers. Or in Dionet’s own words, “Synegram is a bridge between logic and emotion, mathematics and expression, a universal language for music.”
Today, Synegram is building a global ecosystem that combines a powerful online platform, boutique learning centers, and professional tools for music production. Behind the scenes, a carefully built intellectual property strategy, including trademark protection, helping the team turn a fragile intuition into a protected, scalable language for music.
Music Transcription into Geometric Harmony
Like many learners, Dionet began his musical journey inside the traditional system of staff, clefs, and solfège. Over time, he felt that something essential was missing. He could play the notes, but did not feel he truly understood the structure behind them. The distance between what he felt and what he was taught created a sense of impostor syndrome that stayed with him for years.
Through self-study, transcription, and encounters with jazz mentors such as Jean Védrine, Dionet started to redraw music for himself. He placed the twelve notes of the chromatic scale on a circle, then connected them to form shapes every time he played a chord.
Complex voicings became elegant geometric figures. A chord from a celebrated jazz innovator that once seemed mysterious on the page revealed itself as two stacked intervals, perfectly symmetrical when drawn on the circle.
Years of experimentation led to what he calls the “Diamond” of Synegram, a mental model that condenses entire families of harmonic logic into simple shapes. That work later evolved into a broader theory of “harmonic geometry” and is now being documented in a forthcoming book, The Treatise of Synesthesia, which formalizes the intellectual, artistic, and pedagogical foundations of the system.
Mixing Geometric Music with Storytelling
To understand the way Synegram teaches, it helps to start with its logo. Dionet calls it a mental image rather than a simple brand mark. A dot, a line, and a circle embody the three levels of musical perception he teaches to every learner. The dot is vibration, the raw emotion and timbre of sound. The line is the vertical range from low notes to high notes, the space where intervals live. The circle is harmony, the twelve notes arranged in a ring where shapes are born when chords are played.
In a typical Synegram session, children do not start with scales or dense pages of notation. They walk into a boutique filled with large, illustrated characters and bright geometric figures. Each of the twelve core harmonic shapes, such as the circle, triangle, star, or trapeze, is associated with a character and a personality that mirrors its emotional tension in harmony. The “Inventor” represents the circle that knows all notes at once. The “Witch” embodies the tritone, the most dissonant interval, long known as the “devil in music.” The “Dreamer” captures the fairy tale color of certain luminous chords.
Turning Harmony in Visual Sounds
The method follows a clear, playful progression. Children first draw shapes on paper, then count the steps between the points to discover what Dionet calls the “magic formula,” the interval recipe hidden inside each figure. They then transfer those shapes into the Synegram interface, where the same forms appear on a circle of twelve notes and on a linear line of intervals. Finally, they move to the piano or another instrument and play the shapes they have just coded. Within barely an hour and a half, a six-year-old can decode a song, understand its harmonic skeleton, and explain it to another child.
For Dionet, that last step is crucial. When a child is able to teach the next learner how the shapes work, understanding has moved from passive repetition to active mastery. What used to take years of abstract theory now becomes a game of drawing, counting, and playing, guided by a visual language that turns harmony into something you can literally see.
Synegram’s Interface and Tools for Music Composition
Synegram is based in Clermont Ferrand, France, where its first boutique learning center serves as a living laboratory for the method. The company has also opened or planned additional centers and “lab stores” abroad, including pilot locations in Montclair and Manhattan in the United States. These spaces combine physical workshops, digital interfaces, and small-group sessions in which children and adults explore music through shapes and stories rather than dense notation.
On the technology side, Synegram is building a complete ecosystem. The core is an online platform that will launch internationally in 2026, designed as a modular interface where users can explore harmony, analyze songs, and create their own compositions through shapes. A semantic AI companion and machine learning layer provide real-time feedback and smart harmonic predictions, always wrapped in a user experience that prioritizes clarity and visual logic over technical jargon.
Professional tools are part of the roadmap. Synegram is developing plugins and VSTs that bring its visual language into the heart of digital music creation. A plugin is a small piece of software that expands what a music program can do, adding new sounds, effects, or visual tools. A VST is a specific type of plugin widely used by composers and producers. It works inside digital audio workstations and lets musicians load instruments, effects, or analysis tools directly into their creative space. By building visual harmony tools in this format, Synegram allows creators to see the shape of their chords and progressions as they compose. The professional layer mirrors the same interface found on the web platform and the mobile app, which ensures a continuous and intuitive experience from early learning moments to advanced studio work.
Award-Winning Synesthesia Program takes the Global Stage
Years of quiet research and self-financed development are now being recognized publicly. In 2023, Synegram won the ArtTech Prize, awarded by the ArtTech Foundation to one of eight international startups working at the intersection of art and technology. The jury highlighted its ability to reinvent how we see and learn music through synesthesia and symbolic, intuitive interfaces.
In 2025, that momentum accelerated when Synegram received the SXSW Innovation Award in the Audio Experience category at South by Southwest in Austin. The award recognized its pioneering work in transforming musical structure into visual language. Reports highlighted that Synegram’s participation in the Bpifrance delegation at SXSW 2024, combined with months of refinement supported by nearly one thousand beta testers, helped lay the groundwork for this win and strengthened its structured pre-launch phase in Europe and the United States.
Securing Protection of AI-based Visualizer
Intellectual Property as a Backbone, not an Afterthought
From the moment Dionet understood that Synegram was becoming a complete and original method, the team placed intellectual property at the center of its long-term vision. They focused early on securing clear evidence of creation. Then they began shaping a structured international portfolio that reflects the many layers of the system, from its brand identity to its visual language and emerging technologies.
At the brand level, the SYNEGRAM word mark and associated logo are now protected as trademarks in key markets, spanning educational software, musical instruments, printed teaching materials, games and toys, music education services, and software-as-a-service for music creation and learning.
Beyond trademarks, Synegram has built a dedicated strategy for its core visual language. The twelve geometric shapes that form its musical grammar, together with their associated characters and symbolic ecosystem, are being protected as designs and models, first in France and progressively in other jurisdictions. The company also maintains extensive documentary evidence of its research process, ensuring copyright protection and clear authorship for the method and its teaching materials.
On the technological side, Synegram is preparing patent filings for certain aspects of its interface logic and semantic algorithms, while keeping other strategic components as trade secrets. The company is also beginning to explore the emerging frontier of IP protection for AI and machine learning models that follow the musical logic and creative structure of the Synegram method. This work is being carried out with specialized legal partners to ensure that a thoughtful and forward-looking IP strategy supports every layer of technology.
Supporting Inclusive Music Education Around the World
Lessons for innovators at the intersection of art, education, and technology
Synegram’s journey offers several insights into creative startups balancing pedagogy, innovation, and limited resources. First, deep product work and thoughtful IP strategy can happen in parallel. By investing early in trademarks, designs, and documentation, the team has secured the originality of its language without sacrificing its educational mission.
Second, public recognition through awards and festivals can significantly amplify both visibility and credibility when paired with a robust IP foundation.
Third, international tools can be powerful allies for mission-driven startups that need global brand protection long before they can operate in every market.
Most of all, Synegram shows that intellectual property can support inclusive, imaginative teaching rather than restrict it. A strong portfolio allows Dionet and his team to be generous with their method, to design freemium access and inclusive programs for children who might otherwise be excluded from music lessons, while keeping the core of their technology and brand secure enough to sustain long-term growth.
In Synegram’s classrooms, children do not see legal documents. They see stars, circles, witches, dreamers, and inventors. They draw shapes, count intervals, and leave with a mental map of harmony that fits in their hands. Behind those shapes, a carefully protected universe of ideas, artworks, and algorithms makes it possible for that magic to travel, from a small boutique in Clermont Ferrand to learners and musicians around the world.
