That's it really -- the link is at the top of the page (in the row of buttons above the banner). The code itself is a bit primitive and not as nice as my old Java code but it might be useful to someone. More importantly, perhaps, you'll find Scala files for all the microtonal tunings I create for this blog in convenient folder there. No more clunky Dropbox links that expire without warning!

Maud MacCarthy lived a storied life. She was born in Tipperary but spent some of her childhood in Sydney, Australia. in the 1890s she moved to London to train as a violinist at the Royal College of Music, at the same the time embracing the then-fashionable ideas of theosophy. When her career was cut short by an injury she travelled to India with Annie Besant, where she spent several years studying music and mysticism. She and composer John Foulds met when they were both already married but, scandalously for the time, moved in together (they did get married, much later). Foulds was deeply influenced by MacCarthy's studies in Indian music, as we hear in some of his music.

The Bluebird original soundtrack album is now up on Bandcamp and will make its way to all the other platforms in due course. Here I'll say a few nerdy things about it.

The audio drama I co-wrote and did the soundtrack for is now out to buy. Kickstarter backers have all been fulfilled and it's on various platforms, or you can buy it more or less directly from us on Authors Direct. We're very proud of how it turned out. For my part, learning to master an audio drama was quite the experience and soundtracks are always an interesting challenge -- I think we made some difficult but good choices about sound overall, and it has a bit of a sonic identity of its own. The performers are all great. A soundtrack album is in the works that should be out maybe in November; I'll post an update here when it drops.

...in which I sift through 1,073,741,824 possibilities to find 12 interesting ones for the good of humanity. Results and some Scala tuning files inside.

The latest Minimum Labyrinth project is Bluebird, a ten-part audio drama with music by me. After about a year of exploring the ideas and then polishing and testing the script we're running a Kickstarter campaign so we can hire a studio and, you know, pay the actors and engineer a fair price for their labour. It went live today and ends on 8 April 2021 -- the project won't happen without backers, so if you're inclined to help make it happen please do. Some music nerd stuff follows below the fold.

Dividing the octave into 30 notes is an interesting proposition in part because 30 has the factors 2, 3 and 5, which means it contains a few smaller EDOs. In particular, it has three copies of 10-EDO that sit inside it like the three augmented triads (3-EDO) in standard tuning, and I've been working a lot with 10-EDO lately. But 30 notes is a lot to deal with, and far too many for me to play on a single keyboard. So in this post I muse about some ways to split 30-EDO up into more manageable parcels.

In 12EDO, the most interesting scales are (I think) the ones that use about half the notes: 5-, 6- and 7-note scales. In 10EDO, then, it makes sense to look at 5-note scales at least, and perhaps those with 4 and 6 notes. Today we'll look at all the available pentatonics in 10EDO and some relationships between them.

I'm currently working on a project involving mixing 10-EDO with symmetrical structures in 12-EDO. I thought it might be instructive for me to look at tunings that mix pitches from these two. The project is inspired by visionary modernist Paul Scheerbart so I've decided to call them Scheerbart Tunings. Free synthesizer (sort of) inside!

10 EDO divides the octave into ten equal parts instead of the usual twelve. We may as well number these notes 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. This is a pretty tuning that doesn't take too much getting used to. Let's create some harmony out of it.