The Exciting Universe Of Music Theory

Thank you, patrons!

This month has been... complex. Without going into detail, it just means I don't have free time to spend on developing music theory stuff, and even my work on the book has been on hold.

That said, I'm grateful that Patreon is still earning enough to cover the cost of my web hosting. Even though I'm not actively working on new content, I'm still hosting all those scale detail pages, and the complex PHP scripts that make them work!  So, thank you everyone for keeping the lights on....

Slow progress, but still happening

Hi Patrons!

It's been a few weeks since my last update, and I like to keep my patrons updated regularly with what's going on. I haven't really been doing much work on the Music Theory stuff lately, with so much shuffling of priorities as the really hot summer weather rolls by. I have been working on some prototype orchestrations of my composition work, anticipating that I'll pitch it at some orchestras next year (depending on how things go with the massive financial impact of cancelled...

A bit of progress on the book

Howdy patrons! Just a mini-update. I've made some progress on the section about degenerate well-formed scales; this was with a little help from Paul Sherrill (PhD), a music theorist and professor at University of Utah School of Music. The crux is: the set of well-formed scales - those that satisfy the symmetry and closure conditions - includes some scales that do not have Myhill's Property. Those are the EDO (equal division of the octave) scales, and they're called "degenerate" because much o...

Mini update

Firstly, thanks to the new patrons who have joined this crew! My gratitude is profound, because tada! the patronage from everyone combined is enough to offset the monthly server hosting costs. Not counting whatever might happen when I claim it in taxes, but I’m not going to fuss about that. It’s just humbling to see that so many people are willing to chip in a buck or two to keep the machines running. Of course I would love to attract more patronage to cover extra stuff like vintage theor...

Distance Models

Did some more work on the book tonight. Since there was already a section about generators, it was a great excuse to sneak in an extra bit about "distance models", a fairly obscure little nugget from the great theorist Erno Lendvai.

Screen captures attached. Enjoy! And... send me feedback!

I hope it isn't necessary to explain what the Golden Section or Fibonacci are? That seems like prerequisite knowledge that is far enough out of scope of the topic that if someone isn't aware...

Tons of errata in the scale names

Yo! I've been busy-busy tackling a difficult set of corrections in the set of scale names. As you might know, the scale name collection is a motley and messy aggregate from a bunch of publicly-available scale lists, and (not surprisingly) they are full of problems. Recently I received a lot of guidance from an expert in Carnatic Ragas, George Howlett from London, UK. See his website here: https://ragajunglism.org/

There ...

Scope Creep

Drat... I really wasn't intending to do this, but I don't think I can write this book without mentioning, and explaining, a bit about Moments Of Symmetry and Erv Wilson and that means stepping into the complicated world of microtonal scales. It's regrettable, but unavoidable that when on the subject of distribution spectra, the notion of trivalence comes up, and then it's no good not to mention MoS. I'll try to keep it controlled and not go too deep...

Maybe I'll have another sample s...

For Patrons Only: one sub-topic

No promises that this will stay as is, but for now I've got this section about Cardinality pretty nailed down with the wording and facts. I've been hesitant to post excerpts so far because the text is so malleable at this point, but there's no harm in letting y'all see sections of first draft. Enjoy!

FYI for those just joining, this book will be free for all Patrons at the time of publishing, which could be... oh I don't know. Maybe a year from now. So hard to predict. 

Not a lot of work done, but I did find some nifty stuff

Since my last patrons-only update I was contacted by two different scholars regarding some theory stuff, that I'll share with you...

the first was a British academic who is doing some deep research into the methods of John Coltrane. No worries, this isn't the usual "5-pointed circle of fifths" thing that pops up on theory groups every 3 months; this is a person who has been given access by Coltrane's family to personal notebooks scribbled-in by the famous saxophonist. He had been usin...

Table of Contents, of the work in progress

For weeks as I've been writing the book, I've also been digging through my theory materials & sources and organizing all the concepts into chapters. Here's a preview of what it looks like so far. Ignore the page numbers! Some of the sections and subsections have been written (in first draft), but a lot of them are still empty with a TODO placeholder.

Did I miss anything crucial? 

Heteromorphic Profiles

Howdy patrons!

Last night I completed another complicated bit of coding for the scale details: a metric called the "heteromorphic profile".

Near the bottom of the "Analysis" section there is a new metric called "Heteromorphic Profile". It's a three-part measurement of generic-to-specific interval "properness", as described in a brilliant paper by Norman Carey ("On Coherence and Sameness, and the Evaluation of Scale Candidacy Claims", 2002).

If you have a yen for opaque r...

Selfie Transformations

As of this morning, all scale detail pages show which transformations will map a scale onto itself. Obviously T0 is always one but lots of scales have symmetry either by rotation, reflection, or M5 multiplication.

Enjoy!

One more thing... just for Patrons

another thing I didn't mention.

As I work on this book, I will have completed chapters that I'll post for you to read, not just for your amusement but also hoping that you can engage in a little proof-reading? Also, my intent is that anyone who is currently a Patron at the time of publishing will get a free copy, I mean that only makes sense, right? You are literally paying for the writing to get done, so the book is kind of yours from the get-go.

I don't quite know the right w...

New stuff on Transformations, and more.

Hi patrons! I've been plugging away at the book and have a pretty solid scaffolding for all the chapters, as well as some sections of them written and completed. The diligence of researching this book means I'm having to track down references from the past 80 years (or sometimes more) of music theory publications, so that every concept in the Exciting Universe is properly attributed to the person who either invented it, or first published it. It's been a difficult but enlightening experience....

Generators

Hi patrons! Last night I wrote some code to calculate the generator of any scale, if one exists. A generator is an interval; a scale is a “generated scale” if you can start at one tone and travel by the same interval up again and again and eventually visit every tone of the scale. For example, the C major scale has a generator of a perfect fifth, starting on F. Alternately it’s generated by a perfect fourth, starting on B.

As of this morning, all scales on the website h...

So... I'm writing a book

It started as a small endeavour just to turn the scale detail pages into single-page PDF handouts... then I decided to add a preface with some explanation of the terms and stats... and that has expanded into pretty much a whole book with four major chapters and about 45 sections... Very little of it is borrowed from previous work, there are whole new topics being covered that aren't mentioned in the website, and it's all very scholarly and rigorous. I have a great start on it but it's so ambi...

Starting a book

It might take a long time getting it prepared, but I have started compiling all the set theory stuff into a printable / e-book format. Eventually, there will be an Exciting Universe book. We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, yay! Two new patrons recently. Welcome to the crew! Today I enhanced the scale finder on the website so it has an interactive clickable bracelet diagram. It’s going to be useful for me, so I presume it will be useful for other folks too. Cheers

Howdy Patrons

Hi! I have nothing new to post today, but I just thought I'd check in with a general update. It's been a few days since the enormous "scale detail" video project completed, so I took some time away from things to regroup. There are a bunch that have errors that I'll need to re-render and upload again, which I'll get around to in the next weeks, months, etc.

Since you're all supporting me with a generous monthly patronage, I want to make sure you all know what Music Theory stuff is bein...

New Instruction Video

Hey patrons! I finished this one last night, and uploaded it a few minutes ago. Enjoy!

Adding credits to the new videos

Hi! Just wanted to let all my patrons know, that I'm busy rendering all the new "scale detail' videos, and patron credits are being added to the end. But alas due to Youtube upload quotas, I can not get them published as quickly as they're created; this means that the patrons of today will be added to a video that might not be published for days, weeks, or even months. It also means people who sign up in the future might feel unfairly omitted, because the rendering was done before they became...

New stuff!

Hi Patrons!
I just published all the "common triad" stuff onto the scale detail pages. It only shows on the page if there is 1 or more triad that appears in the scale. Here's a good example:

https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/2475

Scroll down to "Common Triads" and you'll see the new stuff. Fun times!

This one was especially satisfying; the theoretical basis for it was only develop...

New materials

Here's a sample of things to come... several days of hard work using ornery technology, boiled down to a few seconds of video. This stuff was inspired by a paper titled "A Graph-Theoretic Approach To Efficient Voice-Leading"  by Susannah Wixey, from the University of Leeds. This is a glorious exhibition of neo-Riemannian geekery, published in 2016. This isn't the music theory of powdered wigs - it's only a few years old! And now these efficient voice-leading graphs will be included in th...

What I'm working on

Hey patrons! A quick update to let you know what's happening in the Exciting Universe. It came to my attention that in my theory pages about scales, some of the notated examples were using weird spelling choices. So for the past month I've been taking a deep dive into algorithms for pitch spelling, hoping to find a satisfactory way that a set of pitch class numbers (eg, [0,2,3,5,7,8,11]) can be mapped to pitches (eg [C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab, B]).

Along the way I've been consulting with Uza...

New Stuff!

Yo patrons! On my vacation I read some nifty papers by music nerds and came away with a new concept for the scale study. Invented by David Rappoport, the "interior area" is what you get when you map your tones spaced around a unit circle, connect all the dots into a polygon, and calculate the area of that polygon. It shares some of the moxy from maximally even sets, but they're more inclusive -- the natural (melodic) minor is has maximal area, as does the neapolitan major.

So, I've add...

New Video: a selection of Jazz and Blues scales

hey! I'm about to upload a new one to YouTube. This one is an eclectic collection of scales that are named after Jazz, Blues, and Bebop.

It'll be there in about 10 minutes

New content on the YouTube channel

I've posted a new video to YouTube, using the new "scale detail" script. It's still not perfect... but it's getting better. I figured since the last time I posted a video there are quite a few more subscribers so I should publish something to keep the whistle whetted. In a few weeks (I hope) the script will be "done" (as if it would ever really be done...) and I'll start rendering all 1490 scale videos. That in itself could take several days, and then uploading them will take much much longer...

Lots of improvements to the website, and the Ridge Tones article

Hey patrons, busy busy times here. I've finished a significant overhaul of the website so it's got decent navigation now. I'll work on the index page later...

Also tonight I worked on the essay about Ridge Tones, with major improvements to the second half in which the connection between ridges and symmetry is laid out.

You'll also notice an improved scale finder.

Enjoy!
https://ianring.com...

More Upgrades

Here's the latest prototype for the new scale videos. The biggest change is I've upgraded all the slide templates to be in 1080p, so the quality is much, much better! There's a little more finesse in some of the grammar, and I've added a longer "ask" to the outro, reorganized the info somewhat, and developed a script to add the Patron credits to the end.

FYI I'm also working on two other tutorial videos. One is about Ridge tones, the other is about Prime Form. I don't know which one wi...

A selection of Scales

This is actually a proof-of-concept made using some new techniques for creating video content. Using these tools I will produce replacements for all the scale videos currently on the channel, and these animations will also be injected into the more pedagogical tutorial ones too.

It's a bit tedious, I know. The next batch will be *far* more interesting.

New Content on the way

Hey loyal patrons! It's been a busy season with a lot of distractions. Fret no longer, as I am working on a new set of videos, partly to replace/improve the ones that are already there, and introduce a new series all about pitch class sets.

I have quite a few topics queued for future work. But if you have a request for something in particular, please let me know.

Regards
Ian Ring