This month has been... complex. Without going into detail, it just means I don't have free time to spend on developing music theory stuff, and even my work on the book has been on hold.
That said, I'm grateful that Patreon is still earning enough to cover the cost of my web hosting. Even though I'm not actively working on new content, I'm still hosting all those scale detail pages, and ...
Hi Patrons!
It's been a few weeks since my last update, and I like to keep my patrons updated regularly with what's going on. I haven't really been doing much work on the Music Theory stuff lately, with so much shuffling of priorities as the really hot summer weather rolls by. I have been working on some prototype orchestrations of my composition work, anticipating that I'll pitch it at ...
Howdy patrons! Just a mini-update. I've made some progress on the section about degenerate well-formed scales; this was with a little help from Paul Sherrill (PhD), a music theorist and professor at University of Utah School of Music. The crux is: the set of well-formed scales - those that satisfy the symmetry and closure conditions - includes some scales that do not have Myhill's Property. Tho...
2020-06-12 17:49:03 +0000 UTC View PostFirstly, thanks to the new patrons who have joined this crew! My gratitude is profound, because tada! the patronage from everyone combined is enough to offset the monthly server hosting costs. Not counting whatever might happen when I claim it in taxes, but I’m not going to fuss about that. It’s just humbling to see that so many people are willing to chip in a buck or two to keep the machin...
2020-06-06 15:50:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Did some more work on the book tonight. Since there was already a section about generators, it was a great excuse to sneak in an extra bit about "distance models", a fairly obscure little nugget from the great theorist Erno Lendvai.
Screen captures attached. Enjoy! And... send me feedback!
I hope it isn't necessary to explain what the Golden Section or Fibonacci are? That seems ...
Yo! I've been busy-busy tackling a difficult set of corrections in the set of scale names. As you might know, the scale name collection is a motley and messy aggregate from a bunch of publicly-available scale lists, and (not surprisingly) they are full of problems. Recently I received a lot of guidance from an expert in Carnatic Ragas, George Howlett from London, UK. See his website here: 2020-05-18 07:21:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Drat... I really wasn't intending to do this, but I don't think I can write this book without mentioning, and explaining, a bit about Moments Of Symmetry and Erv Wilson and that means stepping into the complicated world of microtonal scales. It's regrettable, but unavoidable that when on the subject of distribution spectra, the notion of trivalence comes up, and then it's no good not to mention...
2020-05-13 16:48:35 +0000 UTC View Post
No promises that this will stay as is, but for now I've got this section about Cardinality pretty nailed down with the wording and facts. I've been hesitant to post excerpts so far because the text is so malleable at this point, but there's no harm in letting y'all see sections of first draft. Enjoy!
FYI for those just joining, this book will be free for all Patrons at the time of publis...
Since my last patrons-only update I was contacted by two different scholars regarding some theory stuff, that I'll share with you...
the first was a British academic who is doing some deep research into the methods of John Coltrane. No worries, this isn't the usual "5-pointed circle of fifths" thing that pops up on theory groups every 3 months; this is a person who has been given access...
For weeks as I've been writing the book, I've also been digging through my theory materials & sources and organizing all the concepts into chapters. Here's a preview of what it looks like so far. Ignore the page numbers! Some of the sections and subsections have been written (in first draft), but a lot of them are still empty with a TODO placeholder.
Did I miss anything crucial? ...
Howdy patrons!
Last night I completed another complicated bit of coding for the scale details: a metric called the "heteromorphic profile".
Near the bottom of the "Analysis" section there is a new metric called "Heteromorphic Profile". It's a three-part measurement of generic-to-specific interval "properness", as described in a brilliant paper by Norman Carey ("On Coherence and Sa...
As of this morning, all scale detail pages show which transformations will map a scale onto itself. Obviously T0 is always one but lots of scales have symmetry either by rotation, reflection, or M5 multiplication.
Enjoy!
2020-03-16 13:38:54 +0000 UTC View Post
another thing I didn't mention.
As I work on this book, I will have completed chapters that I'll post for you to read, not just for your amusement but also hoping that you can engage in a little proof-reading? Also, my intent is that anyone who is currently a Patron at the time of publishing will get a free copy, I mean that only makes sense, right? You are literally paying for the writi...
Hi patrons! I've been plugging away at the book and have a pretty solid scaffolding for all the chapters, as well as some sections of them written and completed. The diligence of researching this book means I'm having to track down references from the past 80 years (or sometimes more) of music theory publications, so that every concept in the Exciting Universe is properly attributed to the pers...
2020-03-14 12:15:34 +0000 UTC View PostHi patrons! Last night I wrote some code to calculate the generator of any scale, if one exists. A generator is an interval; a scale is a “generated scale” if you can start at one tone and travel by the same interval up again and again and eventually visit every tone of the scale. For example, the C major scale has a generator of a perfect fifth, starting on F. Alternately it’s generated ...
2020-03-03 13:10:34 +0000 UTC View Post
It started as a small endeavour just to turn the scale detail pages into single-page PDF handouts... then I decided to add a preface with some explanation of the terms and stats... and that has expanded into pretty much a whole book with four major chapters and about 45 sections... Very little of it is borrowed from previous work, there are whole new topics being covered that aren't mentioned i...
2020-02-28 04:22:02 +0000 UTC View PostIt might take a long time getting it prepared, but I have started compiling all the set theory stuff into a printable / e-book format. Eventually, there will be an Exciting Universe book. We’ll see how it goes.
Meanwhile, yay! Two new patrons recently. Welcome to the crew! Today I enhanced the scale finder on the website so it has an interactive clickable bracelet diagram. I...
2020-02-16 00:30:03 +0000 UTC View PostHi! I have nothing new to post today, but I just thought I'd check in with a general update. It's been a few days since the enormous "scale detail" video project completed, so I took some time away from things to regroup. There are a bunch that have errors that I'll need to re-render and upload again, which I'll get around to in the next weeks, months, etc.
Since you're all supporting me...
Hey patrons! I finished this one last night, and uploaded it a few minutes ago. Enjoy!
2019-11-27 18:00:49 +0000 UTC View PostHi! Just wanted to let all my patrons know, that I'm busy rendering all the new "scale detail' videos, and patron credits are being added to the end. But alas due to Youtube upload quotas, I can not get them published as quickly as they're created; this means that the patrons of today will be added to a video that might not be published for days, weeks, or even months. It also means people who ...
2019-11-05 04:34:22 +0000 UTC View PostHi Patrons!
I just published all the "common triad" stuff onto the scale detail pages. It only shows on the page if there is 1 or more triad that appears in the scale. Here's a good example:
https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/2475
Scroll down to "Common Triads" and you'll see the new stuff....
Here's a sample of things to come... several days of hard work using ornery technology, boiled down to a few seconds of video. This stuff was inspired by a paper titled "A Graph-Theoretic Approach To Efficient Voice-Leading" by Susannah Wixey, from the University of Leeds. This is a glorious exhibition of neo-Riemannian geekery, published in 2016. This isn't the music theory of powdered w...
2019-08-22 04:06:02 +0000 UTC View PostHey patrons! A quick update to let you know what's happening in the Exciting Universe. It came to my attention that in my theory pages about scales, some of the notated examples were using weird spelling choices. So for the past month I've been taking a deep dive into algorithms for pitch spelling, hoping to find a satisfactory way that a set of pitch class numbers (eg, [0,2,3,5,7,8,11]) can be...
2019-08-15 13:32:36 +0000 UTC View PostYo patrons! On my vacation I read some nifty papers by music nerds and came away with a new concept for the scale study. Invented by David Rappoport, the "interior area" is what you get when you map your tones spaced around a unit circle, connect all the dots into a polygon, and calculate the area of that polygon. It shares some of the moxy from maximally even sets, but they're more inclusive -...
2019-07-30 16:40:52 +0000 UTC View Posthey! I'm about to upload a new one to YouTube. This one is an eclectic collection of scales that are named after Jazz, Blues, and Bebop.
It'll be there in about 10 minutes
I've posted a new video to YouTube, using the new "scale detail" script. It's still not perfect... but it's getting better. I figured since the last time I posted a video there are quite a few more subscribers so I should publish something to keep the whistle whetted. In a few weeks (I hope) the script will be "done" (as if it would ever really be done...) and I'll start rendering all 1490 scal...
2019-06-24 02:18:32 +0000 UTC View PostHey patrons, busy busy times here. I've finished a significant overhaul of the website so it's got decent navigation now. I'll work on the index page later...
Also tonight I worked on the essay about Ridge Tones, with major improvements to the second half in which the connection between ridges and symmetry is laid out.
You'll also notice an improved scale finder.
Enjoy!
Here's the latest prototype for the new scale videos. The biggest change is I've upgraded all the slide templates to be in 1080p, so the quality is much, much better! There's a little more finesse in some of the grammar, and I've added a longer "ask" to the outro, reorganized the info somewhat, and developed a script to add the Patron credits to the end.
FYI I'm also working on two other...
This is actually a proof-of-concept made using some new techniques for creating video content. Using these tools I will produce replacements for all the scale videos currently on the channel, and these animations will also be injected into the more pedagogical tutorial ones too.
It's a bit tedious, I know. The next batch will be *far* more interesting.
Hey loyal patrons! It's been a busy season with a lot of distractions. Fret no longer, as I am working on a new set of videos, partly to replace/improve the ones that are already there, and introduce a new series all about pitch class sets.
I have quite a few topics queued for future work. But if you have a request for something in particular, please let me know.
Regards
Ian R...