Gary Garrett
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2014–2020
3:47 · 18K views · Oct 28, 2012
Gary Garrett's stop-motion animation of his song Flying Dream, with notes arranged on a lattice of fifths and major thirds. It shows how harmony looks in just intonation, inspired by Harmonic Experience.
Shared as a beautiful example of lattice-based harmony visualization.
6 comments from Hacker News
It looks like there's no problem with just swapping frequencies as you change chords. This youtube video is great, as is the guy's blog: this video
Very interesting, I'll definitely play with it for a bit! I came across this concept of "lattice" about a year ago too, with this beautiful song using it: this video A couple of comments: - Why select notes by right-clicking rather than left-clicking? - When building a chord, it shows the name on top and the scale degree below. But it's the opposite when I drag it to the chord progression zone, it confused me - Might be worth it to add a few tooltips or links for help (eg explaining what's a "parallel progression") - I don't understand why notes are more or less red - It'd be useful to show the scale degree of each note in the lattice (in addition to the note itself and its octave)
For ii, I find it helps to add 10:9 to the list I gave earlier, I just omitted it to stay within the familiar framework of 12 notes-to-the-octave. 12 really isn't enough, though, in a lot of cases. Here's a visualization I like, that uses 22 notes: this video Speaking of large-number EDOs, some people I know locally are doing guitar conversions to 41-EDO. The trick that seems like it absolutely shouldn't work but it does is to omit half the frets, so that only half of the notes are available on each string. [LINK]
Gary Garrett is a musician who works with just intonation (or, as he calls it, untempered music) [0]. Below is a link to a piece he composed [1]. Definitely worth checking out. [0] [LINK] [1] this video
Another way to look at it is that the current notation system isn't the best overall, it's just the most tolerable trade-off between a bunch of mutually-incompatible requirements. Replacing standard notation for all uses may be doomed to failure, but replacing standard notation for some particular use case (especially new use cases that weren't anticipated when standard notation settled into its current form) may be a very useful thing to do. Computers also give us a few new options, such as displaying notation in a time-varying form, or using three dimensions, or notating the music in some universal language that isn't necessarily easy to read but that can be easily rendered in any desired notation. Lattice notation for instance is something I really like, but I don't know how to represent it without some kind of animation. Here's an example I stumbled across on Youtube awhile back of the kind of thing I mean: this video Lattices generalize to higher dimensions, which means they might be amenable to virtual reality or even some sort of human-brain interface that allows you to experience 4 or 5 spacial dimensions at the same time.