Not a lot of work done, but I did find some nifty stuff

Since my last patrons-only update I was contacted by two different scholars regarding some theory stuff, that I'll share with you...

the first was a British academic who is doing some deep research into the methods of John Coltrane. No worries, this isn't the usual "5-pointed circle of fifths" thing that pops up on theory groups every 3 months; this is a person who has been given access by Coltrane's family to personal notebooks scribbled-in by the famous saxophonist. He had been using my website to look up exotic scales that were mentioned by Coltrane, and contacted me to point out a few egregious errors in the Carnatic Ragas (about which he is an expert, and I am definitely not). That evolved into a long conversation about the provenance of scale names in various traditions, and the TL;DR is I am going to be editing and improving (for accuracy) almost all the Raga names, and some of the Hundustani ones too. Plus, he sent me some awesome scans of Coltrane's personal notes about exotic scales. What a treasure!

The second exciting thing was a message from Justin Pecot, who recently completed and published a giant book called "The Dozenal Standard", which lays out a system of organizing (and naming!) 12-TET scales using a 12-based number system. At first I was leery of accepting yet another collection of names for all the scales, but this one is charming and so sensible, I'm going to add its names to the Exciting Universe materials (as a more thorough companion to the Zeitler names). The design of the book is fresh and intuitive, the names are nonsensical but crafted to be easily pronounceable. But moreover, "Dozenal" is not a system that Justin made up, it is a fringe math thing with a long history and those weird flipped "2" and "3" characters for 10 and 11 are in fact old ones used in shorthand, have recently been granted Unicode numbers, and are available in some LaTeX fonts.

Check it out here
https://reverb.com/item/32991259-the-dozenal-standard

I hope you're all staying safe and disinfected. Thank you for your continued support!