This month has been... complex. Without going into detail, it just means I don't have free time to spend on developing music theory stuff, and even my work on the book has been on hold.
That said, I'm grateful that Patreon is still earning enough to cover the cost of my web hosting. Even ...
Hi Patrons!
It's been a few weeks since my last update, and I like to keep my patrons updated regularly with what's going on. I haven't really been doing much work on the Music Theory stuff lately, with so much shuffling of priorities as the really hot summer weather rolls by. I have been ...
Howdy patrons! Just a mini-update. I've made some progress on the section about degenerate well-formed scales; this was with a little help from Paul Sherrill (PhD), a music theorist and professor at University of Utah School of Music. The crux is: the set of well-formed scales - those that satisf...
2020-06-12 17:49:03 +0000 UTC View PostFirstly, thanks to the new patrons who have joined this crew! My gratitude is profound, because tada! the patronage from everyone combined is enough to offset the monthly server hosting costs. Not counting whatever might happen when I claim it in taxes, but I’m not going to fuss about that. It...
2020-06-06 15:50:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Did some more work on the book tonight. Since there was already a section about generators, it was a great excuse to sneak in an extra bit about "distance models", a fairly obscure little nugget from the great theorist Erno Lendvai.
Screen captures attached. Enjoy! And... send me feedback...
Yo! I've been busy-busy tackling a difficult set of corrections in the set of scale names. As you might know, the scale name collection is a motley and messy aggregate from a bunch of publicly-available scale lists, and (not surprisingly) they are full of problems. Recently I received a lot of gu...
2020-05-18 07:21:44 +0000 UTC View PostDrat... I really wasn't intending to do this, but I don't think I can write this book without mentioning, and explaining, a bit about Moments Of Symmetry and Erv Wilson and that means stepping into the complicated world of microtonal scales. It's regrettable, but unavoidable that when on the subj...
2020-05-13 16:48:35 +0000 UTC View Post
No promises that this will stay as is, but for now I've got this section about Cardinality pretty nailed down with the wording and facts. I've been hesitant to post excerpts so far because the text is so malleable at this point, but there's no harm in letting y'all see sections of first draft. En...
2020-05-08 16:32:23 +0000 UTC View PostSince 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 fi...
For weeks as I've been writing the book, I've also been digging through my theory materials & sources and organizing all the concepts into chapters. Here's a preview of what it looks like so far. Ignore the page numbers! Some of the sections and subsections have been written (in first draft),...
2020-03-22 16:29:57 +0000 UTC View PostHowdy patrons!
Last night I completed another complicated bit of coding for the scale details: a metric called the "heteromorphic profile".
Near the bottom of the "Analysis" section there is a new metric called "Heteromorphic Profile". It's a three-part measurement of generic-to-spe...
As of this morning, all scale detail pages show which transformations will map a scale onto itself. Obviously T0 is always one but lots of scales have symmetry either by rotation, reflection, or M5 multiplication.
Enjoy!
2020-03-16 13:38:54 +0000 UTC View Post
another thing I didn't mention.
As I work on this book, I will have completed chapters that I'll post for you to read, not just for your amusement but also hoping that you can engage in a little proof-reading? Also, my intent is that anyone who is currently a Patron at the time of publishi...
Hi patrons! I've been plugging away at the book and have a pretty solid scaffolding for all the chapters, as well as some sections of them written and completed. The diligence of researching this book means I'm having to track down references from the past 80 years (or sometimes more) of music th...
2020-03-14 12:15:34 +0000 UTC View PostHi patrons! Last night I wrote some code to calculate the generator of any scale, if one exists. A generator is an interval; a scale is a “generated scale” if you can start at one tone and travel by the same interval up again and again and eventually visit every tone of the scale. For example...
2020-03-03 13:10:34 +0000 UTC View Post
It started as a small endeavour just to turn the scale detail pages into single-page PDF handouts... then I decided to add a preface with some explanation of the terms and stats... and that has expanded into pretty much a whole book with four major chapters and about 45 sections... Very little of...
2020-02-28 04:22:02 +0000 UTC View PostIt might take a long time getting it prepared, but I have started compiling all the set theory stuff into a printable / e-book format. Eventually, there will be an Exciting Universe book. We’ll see how it goes.
Meanwhile, yay! Two new patrons recently. Welcome to the crew! Tod...
2020-02-16 00:30:03 +0000 UTC View PostHi! 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 a...
2020-01-21 05:12:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey patrons! I finished this one last night, and uploaded it a few minutes ago. Enjoy!
2019-11-27 18:00:49 +0000 UTC View PostHi! Just wanted to let all my patrons know, that I'm busy rendering all the new "scale detail' videos, and patron credits are being added to the end. But alas due to Youtube upload quotas, I can not get them published as quickly as they're created; this means that the patrons of today will be add...
2019-11-05 04:34:22 +0000 UTC View PostHi Patrons!
I just published all the "common triad" stuff onto the scale detail pages. It only shows on the page if there is 1 or more triad that appears in the scale. Here's a good example:
https://ianring...
Here's a sample of things to come... several days of hard work using ornery technology, boiled down to a few seconds of video. This stuff was inspired by a paper titled "A Graph-Theoretic Approach To Efficient Voice-Leading" by Susannah Wixey, from the University of Leeds. This is a gloriou...
2019-08-22 04:06:02 +0000 UTC View PostHey patrons! A quick update to let you know what's happening in the Exciting Universe. It came to my attention that in my theory pages about scales, some of the notated examples were using weird spelling choices. So for the past month I've been taking a deep dive into algorithms for pitch spellin...
2019-08-15 13:32:36 +0000 UTC View PostYo patrons! On my vacation I read some nifty papers by music nerds and came away with a new concept for the scale study. Invented by David Rappoport, the "interior area" is what you get when you map your tones spaced around a unit circle, connect all the dots into a polygon, and calculate the are...
2019-07-30 16:40:52 +0000 UTC View Posthey! I'm about to upload a new one to YouTube. This one is an eclectic collection of scales that are named after Jazz, Blues, and Bebop.
It'll be there in about 10 minutes
I've posted a new video to YouTube, using the new "scale detail" script. It's still not perfect... but it's getting better. I figured since the last time I posted a video there are quite a few more subscribers so I should publish something to keep the whistle whetted. In a few weeks (I hope) the ...
2019-06-24 02:18:32 +0000 UTC View PostHey patrons, busy busy times here. I've finished a significant overhaul of the website so it's got decent navigation now. I'll work on the index page later...
Also tonight I worked on the essay about Ridge Tones, with major improvements to the second half in which the connection between r...
Here's the latest prototype for the new scale videos. The biggest change is I've upgraded all the slide templates to be in 1080p, so the quality is much, much better! There's a little more finesse in some of the grammar, and I've added a longer "ask" to the outro, reorganized the info somewhat, a...
2019-06-01 03:18:50 +0000 UTC View Post
This is actually a proof-of-concept made using some new techniques for creating video content. Using these tools I will produce replacements for all the scale videos currently on the channel, and these animations will also be injected into the more pedagogical tutorial ones too.
It's a bit...
Hey loyal patrons! It's been a busy season with a lot of distractions. Fret no longer, as I am working on a new set of videos, partly to replace/improve the ones that are already there, and introduce a new series all about pitch class sets.
I have quite a few topics queued for future work....