I Was On The Moon

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…

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Putting Some Numbers on Tonal Gravity

I believe the sensation of tonal gravity is the most important driver of tension and resolution in tonal music, music that has a central key note. The tonic is like a sun, creating a gravitational field around it. The lattice is a beautiful map of this gravitational field, in harmonic space. Tonal gravity acts like…

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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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Cents

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…

The Major Scale

The notes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, clustered at the center of the lattice, constitute a major scale. This tuning uses the smallest ratios (the ones with the lowest numbers) available for each position in the scale. It goes back at least to Ptolemy in the 100’s AD. I find it visually…