I am a performing songwriter, based in California. My natural habitat is the West Coast, Colorado and Hawaii.
In 2010, I decided to become a better musician, in order to achieve my goals of making beautiful, powerful music and sharing it with lots of people. I holed up in a San Francisco flat and set to work.
I started by going back to first principles. I asked myself, what exactly is harmony? I had a terrific epiphany in March of 2011, in which I got, at some deep level, the connection between music and math, two of my greatest lifelong interests. The connection between math and reality is extraordinary — it is truly amazing how well the properties of the universe can be described, and predicted, by mathematics. The Higgs Boson is a great example — the math that describes the known universe, when extrapolated further, implies that such a particle should exist — and when the giant accelerator created the necessary conditions, sure enough there it was! Of course it might not have been there too, in which case the math would be refined, just as Einsteinian gravity modified Newtonian gravity and improved our ability to predict what happens under extreme conditions.
Anyway the realization that number was at the heart of music, just as it is at the heart of all creation, was a spiritual experience, perhaps the best I’ve ever had. I did not cut my hair for over two years, because I wanted to keep a reminder of the day I had that revelation, right there on my head.
I discovered the Lattice of Fifths and Thirds, the amazing work of W.A. Mathieu, and started a blog on this website, to document my ongoing journey. My first post was the culmination of five months of hard work, the Flying Dream animation, showing how a song, recorded in just intonation, moves in harmonic space.
The book, Untempered Music, consists of those blog posts in chronological order. By the time you have read through it, I hope you will have a deeper understanding and appreciation of music, and, if you are a songwriter yourself, an inspiration to use the lattice as an aid in your work.
If you find the information valuable, will you donate something? Any amount is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Gary