September update

Firstly, thank you to the new patrons who have signed on recently! When a new patron joins, Patreon sends me a notification to my phone and I get a little "ding!" and it always makes my day.

August wasn't very prolific on the music theory front, but as usual your support has covered all the costs of hosting the website, and for that I am very _grateful_. Alas, very little work was done on the book.

It's been hard to get quality time for the Exciting Universe when the kids are getting back to school and there have been some extra pressures at my day job. The most substantial thing I accomplished was rewriting the JS code that controls the "Amazing Scale Finder", so that not only does it persist the scale number in the URL hash (which means you can use the Back button to return to a scale you were constructing), but also added "rotate" buttons so you can modify a scale as you're using the finder. Booyah.

Go try it out
https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/finder/

I also did a significant amount of work preparing for "version 4" of the youtube video series. This version is going to be much longer and more complete than anything before... and I'm even bringing in a better speech synthesis! The old videos all used "Daniel", a preset voice that comes with MacOS. Now I'm using a more realistic modelled voice made by Google which doesn't have a name. Maybe I should name it. That can come later.

This is a nutty idea, but I actually considered creating an animated talking-head character for those videos. My first inclination was to make a cute but somewhat nerdy robot that would say all the speech in the scale detail videos. I just don't know that there is enough value in what I'm doing to justify all the time spent to figure out 3D modelling and animation to sync a character to generated speech.

OH WHO AM I KIDDING when has "being useful" ever stopped me from working on something geeky? Ha ha ha ha ha

Some interesting new stuff has come in from readers and correspondents. I get a kick out of all the people who refer and link to my scale pages from /u/musictheory on reddit, and some of the "regulars" there are very knowledgable in all the areas that I geek out on. The "centre of gravity" statistics are on the website now, and I'm musing over some interesting ways to visualize subsets. I don't know if that work will bear fruit, so I won't belabour it.

I hope you are all keeping well,
Cheers ~ ian