I've been thinking about the term "outsider artist" lately. When it was coined, the artworld (and in particular, for our purposes, the music world) was unrecognizably different from how it is today. I'm beginning to think that a lot of us could consider ourselves outsider artists and maybe that would be a fruitful response to our present predicament. A rambling monologue follows, but I promise some nice pictures to go with it.

Last time we looked at what we can make from the minor pentatonic scale plus two of the notes b2, 3, b5 and 7. This time we look at the remaining possible notes 2, b6 and 6. The previous batch of scales were rather well-behaved but these are a bit more of a mixture. We'll look through them all, recap everything and see if we can find a higher-level perspective on it all.

Some Sub-Saharan African communities celebrate annual festivals that are preceded by a mandated period of silence (or quiet, at any rate) in which music-making is banned (source, source). I don't know much about these musical cultures but the general idea has been weirdly impactful for me.

The "blues scale" is a common name for the hexatonic you get from adding a b5 to the minor pentatonic (1-b3-4-b5-5-b7). The idea is to play minor pentatonic with a "spicy note". Other spicy notes are the major 3 and (less often employed) the major 7 and b9. As a bit of fun, let's see what happens when we add two of these to minor pentatonic to produce a seven-note scale that, in theory, ought to have one foot in blues / rock language that everyone who has heard twentieth century pop music will be at least a bit familiar with.

Continuing from my previous post, this is an exploration of the tritone sub hexatonic (e.g., C-Db-E-F#-G-Bb) and its complement (e.g. D-Eb-F-G#-A-B). They're the same pitch class set (6-30) but feel and sound very different on the instrument.

Today I spent some time analysing and messing about with Ganamurti, one of the Carnatic melakata scales. This actually happened by accident -- I intended to look at something else, which I'll come back to, but wrote it down wrong on my way to the studio and didn't check until much later. I thought the results were quite nice so I'm counting this as a happy accident.

As a bit of a supplement to my previous post, here's a set of clockface diagrams for all the six- and seven-note scales in 12EDO that are equal to their own inversions. As I observed there, these might be interesting resources because every descending melody such a scale contains also exists as an identical descending version. I'll say more about that after the first pic.

I had a thought today that ended up in a bit of a rabbit hole. This is one of those posts that's probably just pseudo-academic hocus-pocus but there are lots of weird chords and scales in it and maybe there's even something to the "theory" stuff too.

For a while now there's been a discourse in the visual art world around so-called "zombie formalism", coined as far as I know in this 2014 article by artist and critic Walter Robinson. Since we have a decade of to-and-fro about this phenomenon it might be interesting to ask what we can learn about analogous phenomena in the music world.

I recently revisited this post in search of some new harmonic ideas and thought I'd take a closer look at Yagapriya, a rather exotic scale for us Westerners that's very far removed from the diatonic scales we're used to. It also doesn't harmonize easily using my usual tricks so I wanted to treat it more as a unique thing in itself and see where it led me. (As usual I'm using "Yagapriya" as the name for a 12EDO scale; I won't have anything to say about Carnatic music in this post.)