The Exciting Universe Of Music Theory

Tons of progress

During this holiday time off from my day job, I've spent many hours and entire days working on the book. It's been fun and relaxing and rewarding to have so much focus time. The first and last chap...

I still hate fonts

OK so I solved the problem, it was just a unicode mapping issue. This one was easy because I had ...

I hate fonts

Honestly it feels like I'm always struggling with incomplete fonts.
Here is a case where I pro...

Finishing up the "Volume 2" scale pages

I've fussed over these long enough and went through many iterations of layout... in the end it was impossible to fit everything on one page, in a way that was equitably pleasing for scale 1 and sca...

Kinda busy, neglecting

It's been a while since I posted to patreon, and also several weeks since I did any work on the book or the website. The disappointing truth is, my day job got real busy and things at home...

A mention

David Boily digs deep into scales and modes, with a great call-out at the end for yours truly <bow>

2025-09-25 00:56:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Scale name indexes, much progress!

Making the index pages for the scale names has been more of a challenge than I anticipated... but it was all worth the effort. Now I have a script that pulls scale names from the database, and cre...

Rant

Fonts are annoying.
I have spent more of my life fussing with fonts than I have spent riding on rollercoasters, and that my friends is a tragedy.

I know how to fix this, it means mapping...

An unforeseen snag

The past week I've been far more productive than usual; I've been addressing some fundamental problems that had been procrastinated for quite some time. First: generating new fonts that have all th...

Forte errata

I think I've found an error in "The Structure of Atonal Music" on page 52.

Maybe I'm wrong. I posted about it here on Reddit, hoping that someone might take time to sanity-check my findings...

Some small new things

I published a few new resources to the website.

List of all Forte set classes:
https://ianring.com...

Looking up scales by their Forte class

Yeah another thing. Tonight I was trying to put together a diagram of sets based on source material where everything is expressed in Forte class names. All I needed was to look up a Forte class and...

Coincidental Scale 731

It's a freaky coincidence that the scale 731 is in the Forte class 7-31
https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/731<...

Preface

Every book needs an eloquent & verbose word dump about the topic, here's mine.

I'm still on track to have it done this year... as long as I keep picking away at it, a little bit every ...

I don't know anything about Klingon music

... but a recent youtube video on the subject with 64K views on a channel with 25K subscribers did show my website, with a brief mention of the "LIXian" scale.

2025-05-02 14:18:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Work has slowed, but progress continues

In the latter half of December I had a ton of time off of my day-job and I got so much done on the book, and I did plenty more in January... but February was a chaotic month with a lot going on bot...

Holiday obsession and ZC-relations

I managed to figure out ZC-relations yesterday, thanks to some help from folks at the music theory subreddit. Turns out that one of the sources I was using was polluted with errors, and that screwe...

The Corrupted Major mindset

For Patrons only, a preview of that section in Chapter 11. Merely a first draft.

Something frivolous

I made a "dark mode" for the music theory pages. Look in the top right corner. Ta-da!

Images are a little janky because they're just using a CSS inverse filter. But hey it's not bad for 45mi...

Lewin-Quinn FC Components

I've been gradually wrapping my noggin around these Fourier Transforms. When I read about them several years ago, nothing made any sense whatsoever. But now I'm writing about them in the book, I re...

Hypermodes

Phew! I did it. The section about modes is finished. It took two more days that I expected, and it's not "final draft" quality but I'm satisfied that the main guts are done and I'll buff the rough ...

Modes

This weekend I'm focusing on the chapter about modes. If I can get that done, it'll be a major triumph & a milestone achievement for the book, because modes are a hairy and difficult subject --...

Something new

Hey folks,
A few minutes ago I added a new detail to the scale pages. They're called "xenomes", an invention by Qid Love. You can read about it in their book, "2024-11-03 02:56:11 +0000 UTC View Post

Compiling lists, and your data

FYI, the deal here is that anyone who's been a patron is going to get a free e-copy of the book, eventually. To fulfil that promise, Patreon makes some data available to me -- I can export a list o...

A new scale property

Hi!
Lately I have been corresponding with a music theorist named Brian Leonard, who has developed a measurement of intervallic content that he named "Brightness". I've added it to the scale det...

56.17% done

I just did a statistical look at the book in progress. Counting each section (which I admit have widely varying sizes) that is done, in progress (unfinished), and todo. In a spreadsheet.

56....

Another improvement

Props to Cortaigne for these ideas. I've added a "clear" button to the finder. And in the search feature I mapped the characters "b" and "#" so they will also match flat and sharp characters in a s...

Keyboard diagram added

This morning, added this diagram to all scale detail pages. More coming soon.

New features in the Finder

As of a few moments ago, the scale finder has 2 new features.
1) when you click on a note in the bracelet, it will play the tone. You've got to have your speakers on. This will help people who ...

Massive upgrade to the scale names

One of my pet peeves in this whole music theory project is how often I get snide remarks about the collection like "that's not a scale, you made that up".

In response to this, and for the be...