I was asked on the Just Intonation Network Facebook group if I could provide a score for the Flying Dream video, showing the positional notation and all the chords. I went back through my notes and found the score I used to make the movie. Here it is, complete with souvenir coffee stains from various San…
At last, a new full-song video! Owen Plant is my friend, and an outstanding singer/songwriter. He’s the artist-in-residence at a Georgia resort, a completely engrossing performer, and he has written many beautiful songs. Owen commissioned me to animate the title cut from his new album, “I Was On The Moon,” cowritten by Owen and Christopher…
The Harmonic Lattice can be viewed as a map of harmonic space. Music moves in harmonic space, just as it moves in melodic space (the world of scales and keyboards). The two spaces are very different from each other. In melodic space, such as a piano keyboard, when two notes are close together, it means…
Here is the video that started this blog. It is a stop-motion animation of my song Flying Dream, as it moves in harmonic space. It’s a preview of what the blog is all about. Red = bass, yellow = melody, and orange = the harmonies. Be Love is the second full song video I did….
In my last post, I proposed a simple way to graph tonal gravity against the octave. Overtonal notes, generated by multiplying, are restful, stable — they have positive polarity, pulling toward the center. Reciprocal notes, generated by division, are restless, unstable — they push. I call this negative polarity. Mixed-polarity notes have both, and I’ve…
Here is my third stop-motion animation of a full song. Real Girl uses a custom nine-note scale. It occupies the Southeast quadrant of the lattice, the zone of the natural minor, with two added notes — the 7, which allows for a major V chord in the progression, and the 7b5, a blue note that…
I’m almost done with the next full-song video. In the meantime, here’s one more pair of mirror twins for consideration. The 2- is a common melody note in my songs, and in the blues. It goes well with the blue note 7b3 — there is an extremely common melody that goes 7b3, 2-, 1. It’s a…
In the last few posts, I’ve been exploring mirror twins — notes at the same harmonic distance from the center, but of opposite polarity. The notes explored so far are 3/1, 5/1, 7/1, 9/1, and their reciprocals, 1/3, 1/5, 1/7 and 1/9. The 9/1 and 1/9 are made up of two legs on the lattice, x3…
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…
I’ve been quiet lately because I’ve been working on an animation of my song Real Girl. It’s a complicated one, a dance of harmonic tension and resolution. The bass and melody chase each other around the lattice like courting butterflies. Meanwhile, there’s more to be extracted from the Be Love video. A mode is a…