The Exciting Universe of Music Theory

Hello! As I'm sure you are aware, I've been rendering all the "version 3" videos - the longer ones with high resolution - and gradually replacing the old ones. Thanks to everyone who has commented on the new ones to point out errors and omissions. Today I hit a milestone in that half of the new videos are now rendered!! This has taken almost a month to get to this point. The next half will take another month to complete, and then... it will take even longer to get them all uploaded to YouTube and organized into playlists. I appreciate your patience and encouragement! This is a long game involving tons of CPU, lots of time (each video takes about 45 minutes to render) and many terabytes of video material. I've already identified a bunch of videos that will need to be redone when this is all over, so maybe in the early summer (northern hemisphere) I'll have v3 uploaded and then I can do little updates to certain ones with v3.0.1.

I hope you are all keeping well and safe. Cheers, Ian

4 years ago | [YT] | 31

The Exciting Universe of Music Theory

Hi Subscribers! Thanks for your patience this past week as I was working out the kinks in the new video rendering scripts, and similarly adjusting the API functions that update things like the video description, meta tags, playlists, etc. I'm feeling confident that things are working pretty well now.

Now all the errata from last year are corrected, and there are no longer any scales that are missing videos - I've filled in the gaps. So the next phase is: I'm going to do some more upgrades on the video content, and then gradually replace the entire collection with the new ones. But I won't be doing it all at once; hopefully I can figure out a way to make it a slow release with just a few videos going out every day.

Before any of that happens, I'll be doing some diligent work on making sure there aren't any mispronounced scale names, bad spellings, or other errors. For example, just yesterday I did a lot of work verifying and correcting all the names of the "Messiaen" modes, so those will be corrected in the next versions. These corrections are already live on the website but it will of course take much longer for the youtube videos to be updated.

For now I am still only rendering videos that obey the "Zeitler Scale Candidacy" rule of having no leaps greater than a major third (4 semitones). This means there will be exactly 1490 videos, omitting 558 pitch class sets that don't make the cut. I might decide to revisit that decision at some point, and produce videos for all 2048 scales that are featured with details on my website.

Regards,
Ian Ring

4 years ago | [YT] | 21

The Exciting Universe of Music Theory

Hello Exciting Universe Of Music Theory Subscribers!
It's been approximately a year since all the scale detail videos were completed and uploaded.

Over the past year I have collected a few dozen new scale names, and made corrections to dozens more; and I also made improvements to the scale spelling algorithm, so now some of those obscure scales won't be rendered using double-flats and unnecessary natural accidentals.

Changing one scale name or notation spelling means I need to re-render its whole modal family, and its inverse. With the number of scales that were affected by the notation improvements (around 300), and all the modes of those scales, the number of scales that have become obsolete is quite large.

Due to this and some other errata, I decided to undertake making a "version two" of the scale videos as a whole collection. In the new version, I've added a scene that explains the binary representation of the scale and its scale number, and another scene that breaks down the heteromorphic profile (contradictions, ambiguities, differences) in the scale. And not insignificantly, I corrected the way my robot narrator pronounces "Forte" (as in Alan Forte, and Forte Class Numbers), in every single video. Those are the obvious corrections, but I've made a bunch of other little tweaks here and there to improve the quality and pacing.

So over the coming months, my CPU will be revving, rendering every video all over again. Each one takes about 45 minutes. That means at most - running 24/7 - , I can render 32 videos in a day, 224 in a week. Rendering the entire collection of scales will take about a month and a half. But of course I won't have my laptop running this renderer all the time, so it's really going to take quite a bit longer than that.

I haven't figured out how much electricity is going to be consumed when rendering all these videos, but judging from how my computer fan is purring I'd guess this is on par with mining bitcoins. :-O

And then comes the arduous task of uploading them all to YouTube, setting the description, title page, tags, publishing, and putting them in the proper playlists. I'm going to attempt to do this in a way that gradually replaces the existing videos with their new ones, without taking down the entire collection all at once. Because of YouTube's very restrictive API quotas, this isn't trivial, but I'm up for the task.

At this time, I'm going to do videos only for the pitch class sets that have no leaps greater than a major third. Those are the ones that adhere to the "Zeitler Constant" of scale candidacy. At a later time I can fill in the collection with the sparser scales.

I want to shout out a big thanks to my Patreon patrons for supporting this channel. The names of all my current patrons (as of writing this message) are being rendered into all the new videos. It's because of my Patrons that I've been able to upgrade my web server with more RAM, so that the scale detail pages aren't crashing any more. <<thanks>>

4 years ago | [YT] | 24

The Exciting Universe of Music Theory

Well this is exciting. The final batch of "scale details" videos have been processed, and I've had a chance to fix some oddities in the playlists. I have a list of about twenty videos that need to be re-rendered and uploaded again. I'm perplexed why Neapolitan Minor was only a few seconds long. Odd. But it's getting redone now!

My goal for this series is for the videos and their contents to be complete, rigorous, exhaustive, and flawless. If you happen to see any flaws, don't hesitate to reach out and let me know. I read all the comments and reply to most of them.

Cheers
Ian

5 years ago | [YT] | 24

The Exciting Universe of Music Theory

Hello all you music theorists! Thanks to everyone who pointed out the flaws in some of the latest videos that were published, where the wrong scale names were being said aloud in the voice track. I have fixed the problem, the videos have been re-rendered, and they will be uploaded & replaced over the next few days. Cheers!

6 years ago (edited) | [YT] | 15

The Exciting Universe of Music Theory

Howdy all you music theory nerds! As you're fully aware (if you're subscribed), I've figured out a way to optimize YouTube's upload quotas, so that I can publish between 8 and 15 videos per day. That means I might get all the old scale detail videos replaced with new ones in around 135 days, which is far better than the previous estimate. Considering how many are already finished, I'm guessing... April 2020 they'll all be done.

If you spot any errors in a video, make sure to point them out in the comments, so that I can flag it for inspection; in April (ish) when the series is done I'll circle back to correct and re-upload any faulty ones.

Thanks for your support!

6 years ago | [YT] | 15

The Exciting Universe of Music Theory

Hey everyone! As you've likely noticed (if you're subscribed), the new generation of scale detail videos are being gradually uploaded now. One by one, the new ones (discernible by the black cover page, longer duration, and larger resolution) will be uploaded to replace the older ones (white cover, low resolution, short). Youtube has imposed a quota of 4 - 5 videos per day, so it's going to take a long time... I've contacted YouTube to please lift that quota so we'll see how that goes.

Thanks to all my Patrons for supporting this enormous project!

6 years ago | [YT] | 11

The Exciting Universe of Music Theory

This channel has reached 1000 subscribers!! Thank you everyone for your support. I’m working on the next enormous batch of videos - stay tuned.

6 years ago | [YT] | 12