Music

The DJ Jo EP. 

Support independent music and buy The DJ Jo EP and In Distant Lands by Sleep and The Traveller.

In Distant Lands. 

I'm not sure if I'm going to make any original music available here. For now I'm just going to post arrangements of traditional songs. The arrangements and performances themselves are copyrighted, but permission is granted to reproduce and perform them in a non-commercial context according to the license listed in the table below.

There are a couple of things that dissatisfy me about the way music theory has evolved. The taxonomy and nomenclature that has been adopted in melodic and harmonic theory is the result of the evolution of Western music from a diatonic seven note foundation to a chromatic twelve note system. Overlayed on top of one another, we wind up with an inconsistent naming system for chords and an obfuscated system for organizing modes, scales, and keys.

I'll expand on the topic in more detail on a dedicated page at a later time. My basic premise is that a scientist, mathematician, engineer, programmer, or music theoretician—starting from scratch today—would develop a conceptually cleaner organization of musical concepts. For example, scales are nothing more than sequences in a number system. You can subdivide the octave into an arbitrary number of intervals. More than a few systems of music divide the octave into more than twelve or less than seven notes. Any of these systems can be treated as a number system with a radix equal to the number of notes it uses to divide the octave. For example, the chromatic scale is a base-12 number system that can be represented as the sequence:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B

In such a system, there is no need for accidentals. The patterns formed by various scales and modes become self-evident and don't require a level of indirection to translate the notions of dominant, subdominant, sevenths, ninths, and so on into fingerings on a fret or key board. Chords become obvious and don't require names because they can be represented by unique number sequences.

I'll go into more depth as to how such a notation system works later, but I can't say it makes it easier for non-engineers to grasp music theory. I can say that it makes it easier to write data structures for computer programs that implement music theoretic algorithms for arbitrary subdivisions of the octave. I also have no proposals to replace traditional notation for writing music because it is rather space efficient and musicians are able to visually interpret the distances between notes (a subconcious act of subtraction) without a level of indirection (except for they key signature which is internalized as a starting offset into a sequence). However, when reasoning about melodic and harmonic theory, the relationships between notes, chords, the sounds they produce in various combinations, and their transformations, it is much easier to work directly with a numbering system than indirectly with seven letters and accidentals. Working directly with a number system removes the need for the brain to map letters to numbers and back again, which is what you do with the traditional system.

Here follow assorted music-related links of note.