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…
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…
Major and minor chords look like triangles on the lattice. They are closed loops, which I think contributes to their stable feeling. Up a major third, up a minor third, and down a fifth (due West on the lattice) brings you right back where you started. The intervals interlock, and they are all consonant, reinforcing…
I want to show you some lattice movies of how I’ve used blue tritones in my own music. Real Girl has several examples. The clearest is a guitar lick in the chorus: That 7b5 is tasty over the bVI chord. For an instant, it makes a “barbershop seventh,” the 7th harmonic of the root. Here…
I have a favorite note. Don’t tell the others. It’s the septimal flat five, or septimal tritone. I call it 7b5 on the lattice. There are many reasons why I love this note. One is that Jimi played it, and he’s my favorite musician of them all. Another is that this note is rarely discussed…
I just recorded a new song, and it’s a perfect example of how equal temperament and just intonation can get along together. Here’s the cut: Reading this blog might give you the impression that I’m “against” equal temperament and “for” just intonation, or untempered music. True, discovering untempered music has been like sailing to…