Hello!
Lots of progress lately. I've spent lots of time fixing the calculation engine, getting the tooling moved to a new Linux server where I'll be running everything remotely; no more crunching data here on my macbook, it's all happening in the cloud baby! This was long overdue.
Among...
With the acquisition of some new names, I had to acknowledge that my database was a mess. Most of the names I've collected over the past decade(s) are unattributed, unresearched, unverified, and have no validating citations.
So I'm remedying that.
Over the past week I've acquired orig...
I recently acquired a copy of a new theory book: "The Modal Method of Music" by Robert Bedwell. In it, Robert describes an interesting way to organize heptatonic scales in families governed by semitone alterations, and he provides a good practice regime for an instrumentalist wanting to get those...
2024-03-21 02:57:34 +0000 UTC View PostWas working on the book this morning, and found that my SFTP plugin for Sublime Text no longer works, since upgrading my Mac to Sonoma.
This is a wet blanket on my productivity, since I use it nonstop, any time I make an adjustment to the LaTeX or the figure SVGs, I use that tool to upload...
I've pretty much finished the section describing CV. Though just before posting this I noticed that spelling error "degeneerate".
Does this make sense? When I was learning this stuff it was so badly explained it was utterly mystifying. Now that I get it, I hope that I'm able to explain it ...
Today I drew these diagrams to illustrate the "3 gap theorem", which applies to the intervals we find in generated scales -- When a scale has a generator, why there can only be 3 interval sizes. This applies banally to 12-TET tones, but it's far more interesting when applied to microtonal generat...
2024-01-21 18:57:13 +0000 UTC View PostHey everyone,
The solstice holiday was a very productive one for me, for the theory textbook. I did a fair bit of writing and editing, but the most ambitious thing was re-exporting all the illustrations and figures and diagrams, and swapping them into the LaTeX file as vector PDF instead of r...
So... I started generating all those images, and then I did some napkin math
The file storage it would take to have them all pre-rendered at full size is more than my server can handle. Like, a LOT more. Terabytes more.
I'm thinking of putting them in the cloud, perhaps in an S3 buc...
I noticed that once in a while, I get a 404 error in the server logs, for images in the general music theory assets. That shouldn't be happening! Perturbed, I looked in some folders and saw that there are random files missing. Maybe they were victims of a bad transfer, or perhaps they've always b...
2023-11-20 04:18:16 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a better version of a diagram I made back in 2016 or so. These are the truncations of modes of limited transposition, described by Messiaen. A truncation is when you remove tones from a scale to produce a subset with preserved rotational symmetry. Solid arrow indicates removal of 2 tones ...
2023-10-17 03:21:11 +0000 UTC View PostFirstly, 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 t...
I had a brief conversation with user u/howaboot on reddit. They had calculated all the centroids for heptatonic scales, and shared the results with me; and I noticed it is a generalization of what I had previously written about "balanced" scales. A balanced scale is one where the "centrifuge prob...
2023-07-29 01:49:40 +0000 UTC View PostBook 2, "the scales" is supposed to have one page for each scale... I shuffled some things around and this is the way they look now. I like that everything fits on the page, but the asymmetry turns me off. It might not stay this way.
2023-07-17 02:48:29 +0000 UTC View Post
It took a long time to get around to this. I was preparing some of these diagrams for the book and realized that I never put them on the website.
So, several hours later I have 2048 of these tables, rendered with a handsome clarendon font... and on the website they are annotated with circl...
Hello patrons!
Last time I wrote, I was going to upgrade my web server... and I did it. Mostly pain-free. There are some broken links and notation images, still. I will fix those, when I generate sufficient time and motivation. My plan is to replace some of the notation figures so they us...
This new scene is going to appear in the next generation of scale data videos. Version 4 is slowly evolving, I can't promise when it'll be launched but it will probably be some time later this year. I'm making a whole fancy publishing bot that will let me more easily re-render and upload new vide...
2023-04-02 13:44:22 +0000 UTC View PostBusy times as ever, here... but I am still diligent about always spending at least a few hours per week on music theory things.
The past couple of weeks, I have not been working on the book; instead I've been doing the mundane chore of software maintenance. A lot of the scripts used on th...
The past couple of months have afforded me some free time, which I spent making great strides on writing the book.
A lot of time is spent doing calculations to make sure that every fact in the book is 100% absolutely correct -- this is not a trivial task! All the tables, lists, and even s...
Patreon rolled out a new thing, it's called "subscription billing". With it, patrons are charged on the day they sign up and then monthly thereafter, on that same day of each month. That way, there are no situations where someone gets charged twice in a month.
This seems like a good idea,...
It seems like a long time since I posted anything here. Much has been happening. As always, the website with all the scale data is up and running, and for that I thank my patrons because your contributions cover the whole cost of the hosting! Thank you - because of your help that's one less bill ...
2022-10-06 21:19:01 +0000 UTC View PostIn the past month, things generally have aligned better with working on the book. I have been working on it at least once a week anyways, but in the past while I've had the motivation to spend a little time on it almost daily. I finished a decent first draft of the chapter on coherence, and I wor...
2022-07-05 04:06:07 +0000 UTC View PostHi Patrons,
After some time shuffling priorities and sorting out some personal shit, recently I've been occasionally spending some time working on the Music Theory book. Yesterday I spent some time getting the rough outline done for the chapter about modes. The book in its entirety has grown t...
It is with gratitude and humility that I checked my Patreon account today to send this update. The update is, frankly, that I'm not doing much these days... since life has thrown some curve-balls my way, and the time I used to spend on The Exciting Universe (making videos, working on the book, ti...
2021-11-30 12:13:37 +0000 UTC View PostOver the past two weeks, I've made dozens of corrections to the video scripts, and I added two whole new scenes. Among the improvements: long scale names won't overlap in the layout; animation sync with sound will be better; lots of errata in the scale names are corrected, some minor typos ...
2021-03-30 05:47:08 +0000 UTC View PostHi, patrons! For the past few weeks I've been getting intermittent crashes on the web server, and the database that holds all the scale names and other stuff. It didn't always cause a 500 error, sometimes it merely manifested as a PHP error on the scale detail pages. It was time for an upgr...
2021-02-28 02:28:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi patrons!
Sorry it's been a while since I posted an update here. There isn't a lot to report, because I'm not really planning to make any new videos and I don't have any new material to post on the website. Really my focus (in the spare time that I'm able to devote to it) is on wr...
In the next few days/weeks I'm rendering a big batch of videos to replace ones that have incorrect scale names in them. The new ones will have the Patreon credits at the end with the names of everyone who is a Patron right *now*, at this moment (I exported the list to use it in the videos).
<...
Well it seems the days are long, but the weeks are short. Since my last update I have done some more work on the book; particularly on a chapter sub-section about "Cohn Sets". These are scales that can form optimally smooth "Cohn cycles" made by a "Cohn flip" where a pcs is flipped to its inverse...
2020-11-21 02:17:11 +0000 UTC View PostAn update for mid-October: I spent a bit of time on writing the book last week, adding some better explanations on a section about Interval Vectors. Other than that, my energy has mostly been focused on preparing an EP for release (it'll be out Oct 31), along with domestic stuff and day-job antic...
2020-10-19 12:45:17 +0000 UTC View Post