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…
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…
Throughout my musical education, I’ve been taught that music happens in a linear space. This is the space so beautifully laid out on the piano keyboard. Music teaching is organized around scales. In most Western music, the full scale consists of twelve notes, equally spaced. Other scales, such as the seven-note minor and major scales,…
Jody Mulgrew and I are putting together a few shows in the next few months, and for rehearsals, I’ve been recording versions of some of my songs. Jody and I blend like brothers, so the emphasis is on the harmonies. I especially like the way Flying Dream and Breakup Songs came out. That’s me singing…
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…
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…
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…
Every prime number generates a new musical universe. Prime numbers are numbers, greater than one, that can only be evenly divided by themselves and 1. All other numbers are composite — that is, they can be made by multiplying two or more primes. 1) Multiplying by 1 does nothing. 1 is a singularity, the universe before the…
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 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.)…