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Cents

Musical notes can be mapped onto many different spaces. The two I find useful so far are: — Harmonic space, the space of the lattice, organized by harmonic connections (ratios of whole numbers). — Melodic space, the space of the scale, organized by pitch, or frequency. Both maps show the location of a note relative…

Calendar Page

I’ve added a new page with places and times you can come hear and see this music live. If you’d like to be on my regular mailing list, please let me know through the contact page. I send out a few emails a month, mostly about upcoming shows, occasionally with other news. I’m excited about…

Mozart on the Lattice

In one of my favorite passages in Harmonic Experience (p. 104-105), W.A. Mathieu points out that by the time Mozart came around, equal temperament was well enough established that a D# and an Eb could be thought of as the same note. So when Mozart wanted his melody to go back and forth between an Eb and…

Summary (So Far)

I messed around with electronics quite a bit as a kid. I’d put things together according to diagrams, and if they didn’t work, I’d change something and see what happened, and get a feeling for what was happening inside the black box. When I started doing audio electronics in earnest, I found the oscilloscope. Here’s…

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Seven

My favorite contemporary band is the Black Keys. I think Dan Auerbach is a harmonic genius. The video is funny. Dinosaur? What dinosaur? This song lives in the universe of 7. I just spent a half day taking apart the main riff and seeing how it works out on the lattice. It strictly uses a…

The Augmented Fourth

I’ve described eleven notes now, and each one has a piano key to go with it, an equal tempered equivalent. The one remaining black key has a lot of names. It’s the note between the 4 and 5, right in the middle of the octave — the tritone, devil’s interval, flatted fifth, augmented fourth. In…

The Minor Second

The last three notes (b6, b3 and b7) are related to each other. They all contain a reciprocal third. There is a family resemblance of sound and function. (They also all happen to be a little flat in equal temperament. On a guitar it’s a nice trick to bend them a little to sweeten them.)…