Howdy Patrons

Hi! I have nothing new to post today, but I just thought I'd check in with a general update. It's been a few days since the enormous "scale detail" video project completed, so I took some time away from things to regroup. There are a bunch that have errors that I'll need to re-render and upload again, which I'll get around to in the next weeks, months, etc.

Since you're all supporting me with a generous monthly patronage, I want to make sure you all know what Music Theory stuff is being done. I haven't been making new videos lately, but it doesn't mean I haven't been busy...

For a few weeks, I've been corresponding with a music theorist from Italy who is working on some fascinating stuff related to the measurement of brightness and evenness in a sonority, as well as some other things that I mustn't reveal yet... it may prove to be an elegant unification of set theory and tonality. Really cool stuff. My part in the research has been to assist with computation of some of the musical properties being hypothesized. Fun times, and maybe, possibly, it will end in a formal paper. We'll see!

I've also been collaborating with a world-leading expert in AI and Machine Learning, who is trying to teach his pseudo-intelligent bot to compose piano music. The results so far have been kind of hilarious, with the bot choosing to plagiarize lengthy sections of Beethoven and Mozart verbatim, and sometimes get into loops where it plays the same note dozens of times like a jackhammer. But it's still a YOUNG bot, and has a lot of learning to do! This is a technology that won't get worse, and honestly it is incredible to see how it works and to see the results of its first attempts.

This is the same AI that has previously learned to understand the English language, read a page of text, paraphrase sections of it, and ask meaningful questions about the content. It's so good, it's actually a bit scary. So thinking it could learn to understand music isn't a crazy notion.

For the past three months I've been working hard on "A Theory Of Harmony" by Ernst Levy, and I finally finished it a few nights ago. This is the original treatise that laid out the fundamentals of so-called "negative harmony" which has caught some buzz in the past year. Why did it take so long to read? Because that book is very dense and VERY BADLY WRITTEN to the point of being nearly incomprehensible. I found that I was unable to comprehend it unless I read each sentence and paragraph carefully, while attempting to figure out what the author meant, and making copious notes in the margins to refer to while deciphering the obtuse and opaque concepts.

What I did learn from that (somewhat painful) study is that most of the fluff-pieces about negative harmony that have emerged in the past year are mostly correct, but not entirely, and they're definitely a lot shallower than the original tome. Ernst had a lot more to say than "turn all your intervals upside down", and he invented an entire glossary of new terms to explain it all.

This is the book I'm referring to:
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0873959922/

Next on my reading list is a sourcebook about the intersection of music with ancient mysticism and magic, and I'm really looking forward to it. If you want to read along, here it is:
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0140190406

As always I really appreciate your patronage, and I hope that the music theory resources I've published are helpful and inspiring. I'm likely going to make another "tutorial" video in February, and I'm not really sure what the topic will be but right now I'm thinking ... I should do a video that explains "Moments Of Symmetry (MoS)" because they're weird and complicated and hard to grok but once you get what they are, they're really quite cool.

If you have any ideas/suggestions for the next tutorial video, let me know! A good candidate will be a topic that is 1) maybe a little obscure, 2) interesting, and 3) not adequately covered by the other ten thousand music vloggers out there.

Cheers!
Ian