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.

We have been thinking about dividing the 12 notes of our ordinary tuning system (12-EDO) into two distinct regions, each of which is a whole-tone scale. Each region can be thought of as a tuning in itself, 6-EDO, the equal division of an octave into six notes. In this post we consider how the Augmented Hexatonic can help us bridge the gap between these two regions.

This post is a continuation of the last one in which we look at supplementing the rather limited whole-tone harmony with one or more added notes. The resulting chords take us away from "pure whole-tone harmony" in the same way that, for example, secondary dominants and other borrowed chords take us away from "pure diatonic harmony" while simultaneously enriching it.

Imagine your instrument lost exactly half of its notes, and specifically every alternate one. It might make sense to say you now had an instrument turned not in 12-TET but in 6-TET. In a society that only had such instruments, which harmonies would be available to them?

Today I've released a 12-track, 3-hour album based on Margo Schulter's Zeta Centauri tuning. Listen to it on Bandcamp while you read my slightly geeky notes about it.

Of course a modernist manifesto in 2020 is a bit absurd (pun half-intended), but something has to be done -- or, to put it another way, we have to start somewhere. Postmodern culture, which has produced so few things that meant anything to me, has been stone dead for quite some time but its ability to envelop and ironize anything makes it hard to transcend. It's a blockage that needs clearing away.

I've always written manifesti of some kind at times like these, even if they were usually private, so here goes.

I'm currently trying to prise myself away from my latest project and release it -- more on that soon, I hope -- and thinking about the next one. It got me onto the subject of how I handle large-scale forms and I thought it might be useful to try to set that down. Most of this blog is about the local details involving a note, scale or chord so this is a bit of a departure.

Since shifting most of my attention from guitar to piano, I've been enjoying (among other things) the ability to play two kinds of chord: those with lots of notes and those with notes that are close together. In this post we look at a family of 7- and 8-note voicings (guitarists may be able to apply these by dropping some notes or, of course, by playing with someone else).

Today Minimum Labyrinth releases The Chymical Wedding, a six-hour album setting a reading (by Robert Kingham) of a strange alchemical text from the early 1600s to a continuous musical soundtrack (by me).