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…
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…
Here’s an interesting and perhaps misunderstood note. It’s a compound move on the lattice: down a third and up a fifth. Or up a fifth and down a third, it doesn’t matter what order. So the ratio is 3/5, or 6/5, octave reduced. The note is the minor third. I call it b3. It lives a…