About
I am a singer/songwriter, based mostly in San Francisco. My natural habitat ranges from Harbin Hot Springs in the north to Pismo Beach in the south.
In 2010, I decided I needed to become a better musician in order to achieve my goals of making great music and singing for lots of people. I started out on a study of music that quickly became a fascination in itself.
I started by exploring just intonation, and 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’m still exploring the implications. This blog is an account of the journey.
I can be reached by commenting on this blog. I welcome discussion and am interested in communicating with kindred spirits.
Dang, Gary. This lattice stuff makes my head spin bit, although I think I sort of get it, and maybe even do it sometimes. Do you think that it’s fair to say that it’s a mathematical approximation of the “slop” in my guitar playing that makes it mine instead of someone else’s? Or is more akin to playing the guitar in an open tuning that you don’t really know much about, where you sort of listen to what “sounds cool”? Now that I think of it, it seems like it could be more closely related to playing a guitar through a synthesizer box that lets you de-tune things a bit so that you can do things that are pretty difficult without the tech. Or am I overly complicating simple stuff (or overly simplifying complex stuff)?
Hi Matt, I’d say all three, although synthesizer boxes usually retune things to equal temperament, which is not the lattice. #1 is especially true. When you bend notes into tune by ear, you are putting them “on the lattice.” Hendrix tuned flat and bent everything to taste, and his intonation was great. You taught me to bend the 4 and get the blue tritone, which is a really important note I now call the septimal flat five. Thank you!