When I first learned to play guitar, I would sit on the couch late at night and pluck the low E string, again and again, and just listen to the beauty of the sound as it died away. That low E note is not just a simple vibration. The full length of the string is…
I grew up thinking that music was made with a particular set of twelve notes, the ones on the piano keyboard. I had a vague sense that there were other scales in the world, but I thought of them as “more primitive” or perhaps subsets of the 12-tone scale, like that pseudo-Asian music you make…
Over the next series of posts, I’m going to explain how the lattice in the Flying Dream video works. Before I do, I want to take time to mention a terrific book. I started investigating just intonation in earnest in early 2011. A couple of months in, my friend Kay Ashley loaned me her copy…
Music is the thread that stitches my life together. I was born singing, as are we all. My parents loved to sing and they both had beautiful voices. They met in a musical play in college. I remember our house as being filled with music, especially jazz and harmony vocals. Stan Kenton, the Mills Brothers, Sons…
This may have been the most intense art project of my life. Some time early in 2012, I got it into my head to create a stop-motion animation of my song Flying Dream, moving in harmonic space. I’ve spent the past five months working like crazy on it. The song is carefully arranged using the…