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More Mirror Twins

Mirror twins are pairs of intervals, exactly opposite each other on the lattice. The two intervals are reciprocals of each other, which means their ratios are flipped — if one is 5/3, the other is 3/5. Harmonic distance is the same for each interval — the only difference is polarity. Listening to mirror twin pairs gives…

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Rosetta Stone

Almost all Western music, including my own, lives in the world of tonal harmony. This means: There can be, and usually are, multiple notes playing at the same time. There is a key center, or tonic, around which the notes are arranged. The tonic doesn’t always sound — it’s an intangible presence, the home from which you leave on your…

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Entrainment

I recently read Mickey Hart’s beautiful book, Drumming at the Edge of Magic. Hart is best known as one of the two drummers of the Grateful Dead. His book tells the story of his lifelong fascination with percussion, and of his investigations into the ancient connection between rhythm and the human spirit. Toward the end…

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“Untempered” vs. “Just Intonation”

Even though I love just intonation, I have a couple of problems with the term itself. One is grammatical. It’s a noun, and sometimes I want an adjective, as in “the just intonation version compared with the equal tempered version.” Kind of awkward. How else would you say this? “Justly intonated”? “The version in just…