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…
A note, in music, is a sound with a particular pitch. Pitch is frequency, measured in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz). The faster the vibration, the higher the pitch. A vibration, at, say, 220 Hz, all by itself is a note by that general definition. But the note doesn’t acquire its distinct personality until it’s…
It may be Keats’ most famous pair of lines: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ I believe he’s right on the money. I think that when we experience beauty, it’s because we have seen a little deeper into the nature of things. This seems…
Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher who lived about a century before Athens’ golden age. Some time before 530 BC, he had an epiphany. He had been investigating vibrating strings, and found that when you cut the length of the string in half, the note it makes is an octave higher. Sound is vibration. When one…
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…
I’ve added a few new tracks to the Audio page today. Two of them are live cuts with Jody Mulgrew, my great musical pal. The Cove is my song and Jack of Hearts is his. They were both sung at the Greco’s in Shell Beach, a couple of years apart. We plan to do some…
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…
For almost two years now, I’ve been exploring the nature of music almost full-time. I threw out everything I knew, started with the most basic thing I could think of, the number 1, the origin of the musical universe, and worked my way from there. My explorations quickly led to the underpinnings of musical harmony,…