The Exciting Universe Of Music Theory

Tons of progress

During this holiday time off from my day job, I've spent many hours and entire days working on the book. It's been fun and relaxing and rewarding to have so much focus time. The first and last chapters are completely done, and "Volume 2: The Scales" is finally complete. That was a massive job.

I made a lot of progress...

I still hate fonts

OK so I solved the problem, it was just a unicode mapping issue. This one was easy because I had previously spent several weeks designing glyphs and generating new fonts, and I only had to do a replace command on the scale name...

I hate fonts

Honestly it feels like I'm always struggling with incomplete fonts.
Here is a case where I probably need to map the Unicode standard glyphs to the SmuFL code points and re-render. Fingers crossed hoping I don't need to build...

Finishing up the "Volume 2" scale pages

I've fussed over these long enough and went through many iterations of layout... in the end it was impossible to fit everything on one page, in a way that was equitably pleasing for scale 1 and scale 4095 and everything in between. I tried cramming things in with a smaller font size, but it became unreadable, unacceptable. So...

Kinda busy, neglecting

It's been a while since I posted to patreon, and also several weeks since I did any work on the book or the website. The disappointing truth is, my day job got real busy and things at home have been just as crammed. Nights of overtime, chores, errands, family stuff. You know. The last work I did on the book was to fi...

A mention

David Boily digs deep into scales and modes, with a great call-out at the end for yours truly <bow>

https://youtu.be/xOdhv5jrm0U?si=OuFe4Orglnh5h3Ce&t=1435

Scale name indexes, much progress!

Making the index pages for the scale names has been more of a challenge than I anticipated... but it was all worth the effort. Now I have a script that pulls scale names from the database, and creates something almost acceptable as a PDF. The painful part was paginating and collating a flow in three columns, in a way that su...

Rant

Fonts are annoying.
I have spent more of my life fussing with fonts than I have spent riding on rollercoasters, and that my friends is a tragedy.

I know how to fix this, it means mapping the standard Unicode accidentals to the corresponding SMuFL codepoints, and that is not how I anticipated spending my morning. 2025-08-23 10:52:41 +0000 UTC View Post

An unforeseen snag

The past week I've been far more productive than usual; I've been addressing some fundamental problems that had been procrastinated for quite some time. First: generating new fonts that have all the musical glyphs needed for scale names and degrees -- so the book uses proper SMuFL Unicode points. I'll need these fonts to have...

Forte errata

I think I've found an error in "The Structure of Atonal Music" on page 52.

Maybe I'm wrong. I posted about it here on Reddit, hoping that someone might take time to sanity-check my findings:
2025-06-07 13:09:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Some small new things

I published a few new resources to the website.

List of all Forte set classes:
https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/forteclasses/

List of all Deep scales:
2025-05-31 12:52:51 +0000 UTC View Post

Looking up scales by their Forte class

Yeah another thing. Tonight I was trying to put together a diagram of sets based on source material where everything is expressed in Forte class names. All I needed was to look up a Forte class and find its prime and see what scale that is, in binary.

My Scale Finder tool is not very helpful for that. I do have a datab...

Coincidental Scale 731

It's a freaky coincidence that the scale 731 is in the Forte class 7-31
https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/731

Forte was not looking at binary scale content, I guarantee it. And the number "7" in Forte classes refers to the cardin...

Preface

Every book needs an eloquent & verbose word dump about the topic, here's mine.

I'm still on track to have it done this year... as long as I keep picking away at it, a little bit every week. But I need to stop adding more sections! We don't really need a section about multi-dimensional tonnetz, do we? If I keep ad...

I don't know anything about Klingon music

... but a recent youtube video on the subject with 64K views on a channel with 25K subscribers did show my website, with a brief mention of the "LIXian" scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LjcBv-OWtQ&t=90s

Thank...

Work has slowed, but progress continues

In the latter half of December I had a ton of time off of my day-job and I got so much done on the book, and I did plenty more in January... but February was a chaotic month with a lot going on both personally and professionally, and I didn't make a lot of progress with the music theory project(s). Feels like I've been neglec...

Holiday obsession and ZC-relations

I managed to figure out ZC-relations yesterday, thanks to some help from folks at the music theory subreddit. Turns out that one of the sources I was using was polluted with errors, and that screwed me up for quite a while. But I've figured it out now. Consequently I calculated from scratch all 16 ZC-related pairs, including ...

The Corrupted Major mindset

For Patrons only, a preview of that section in Chapter 11. Merely a first draft.

Something frivolous

I made a "dark mode" for the music theory pages. Look in the top right corner. Ta-da!

Images are a little janky because they're just using a CSS inverse filter. But hey it's not bad for 45min of work.

Lots of writing on the book lately. I've been focused on the chapter about naming scales, since it's the most ch...

Lewin-Quinn FC Components

I've been gradually wrapping my noggin around these Fourier Transforms. When I read about them several years ago, nothing made any sense whatsoever. But now I'm writing about them in the book, I re-read the same materials, and it all makes sense. And that's peculiar because I definitely haven't become more intelligent. Goes t...

Hypermodes

Phew! I did it. The section about modes is finished. It took two more days that I expected, and it's not "final draft" quality but I'm satisfied that the main guts are done and I'll buff the rough spots later.

Unrelated to modes, there is a section in the book describing Hypermodes. Here it is, a preview for paid memb...

Modes

This weekend I'm focusing on the chapter about modes. If I can get that done, it'll be a major triumph & a milestone achievement for the book, because modes are a hairy and difficult subject -- right now I'm compiling LaTeX and wondering why a script that worked 2 days ago stopped working today. (???). I know I'll eventua...

Something new

Hey folks,
A few minutes ago I added a new detail to the scale pages. They're called "xenomes", an invention by Qid Love. You can read about it in their book, "The Book Of Xenomes". A xenome is a succinct way to encode a pitch cla...

Compiling lists, and your data

FYI, the deal here is that anyone who's been a patron is going to get a free e-copy of the book, eventually. To fulfil that promise, Patreon makes some data available to me -- I can export a list of all members, which includes a name (not necessarily your real name, it's the one you provide in your own profile), your email ad...

A new scale property

Hi!
Lately I have been corresponding with a music theorist named Brian Leonard, who has developed a measurement of intervallic content that he named "Brightness". I've added it to the scale detail pages, along with a notation system also used by Leonard in his work.

The Brightness property is very simple -- it is ...

56.17% done

I just did a statistical look at the book in progress. Counting each section (which I admit have widely varying sizes) that is done, in progress (unfinished), and todo. In a spreadsheet.

56.17% of the sections are done.
another 24.07% are started and in some stage of not finished yet.
19.75% of the book has jus...

Another improvement

Props to Cortaigne for these ideas. I've added a "clear" button to the finder. And in the search feature I mapped the characters "b" and "#" so they will also match flat and sharp characters in a scale name. Enjoy!

Keyboard diagram added

This morning, added this diagram to all scale detail pages. More coming soon.

New features in the Finder

As of a few moments ago, the scale finder has 2 new features.
1) when you click on a note in the bracelet, it will play the tone. You've got to have your speakers on. This will help people who construct scales by ear.
2) Below the old finder, there's a name search. This has been requested many times! So I'm happy to fi...

Massive upgrade to the scale names

One of my pet peeves in this whole music theory project is how often I get snide remarks about the collection like "that's not a scale, you made that up".

In response to this, and for the benefit of researchers, published yesterday: a huge upgrade to how I organized and publish the lists of scale names. If you go to th...