The Exciting Universe Of Music Theory

May 2024 progress update

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 crunchin...

Intense amounts of work

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 ha...

tons of new scale names

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 semi...

Stymied by tools, again

Was 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 ...

Cardinality = Variety

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 ...

3 gap theorem

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. Th...

So productive!

Hey 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 illu...

Visualizations, reimagined

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...

Fixing up all the assets

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 th...

Hierarchy of Truncations (new!)

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 sca...

common triad species in a tonnetz

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.
2023-09-19 02:54:11 +0000 UTC View Post

New scale metrics: Center of Gravity

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 ...

Revamped scale summaries

Book 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...

Interval Matrices

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...

Update on things

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 ge...

Presenting: hierarchizability

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...

a geeky shift of focus, temporarily

Busy 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...

So much progress

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 ...

Subscription Billing

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...

Hi Patrons! An update.

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 contr...

Good news, and progress

In 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 li...

Progress Update

Hi 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 t...

Good morning, Patrons!

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 m...

Tons of video corrections!

Over 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; animatio...

Upgrades! And Progress!

Hi, 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, so...

A mind-map of topics

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 materia...

Oh hey guess what. Video updates.

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 every...

More work, and some errata

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...

Good morning patrons

An 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 focus...