Last night, I had another sleep study.

If you read my previous post on this subject, I have been diagnosed with sleep apnea. No matter how much sleep I got, I was always exhausted. It has led to a number of other problems, including high blood pressure.

Well, last night the solution came.

But before I get there, let me tie this in to my music — a bit of history that I’ve kept hidden.

In November of last year, I released my first album, evolution, on Jamendo. At the time, I was struggling with exhaustion in the afternoons. I would counterbalance that by drinking an entire pot of coffee. This allowed me to avoid taking a nap. I did not want my days “wasted” by sleep.

That first album proved to be pretty popular. Even today, I still get positive reviews — and believe me, the words of encouragement matter. If you are a fan of independent music, sometimes you do not realize how much you really and truly matter — the words of encouragement can often get us musicians through even the darkest times.

Just 3 months later, I released my second Jamendo album, handmade. The reviews weren’t as great, but the downloads keep on coming. Some people have apparently liked it a lot. In May, I even had someone contact me and tell me they had used “A Spy in the House of Pancakes” on a student film project! I was honored.

But at the same time, May was an awful sort of turning point. Years ago, I had a problem with high blood pressure (mostly related to stress). Since then, I had been monitoring my blood pressure at least once a month. Well, in May, I tried it, and the number was high — 162 / 103. I thought, Well, this is just a fluke. I’ll try again next week.

Next week it was even higher.

In fact, every time I checked, it was high. And so I scheduled an appointment with my doctor. I also stopped drinking that entire pot of coffee.

Unfortunately, that meant I found myself too drowsy in the evenings to get anything done. I tried practicing, I tried composing, but I found myself — well, the feeling I could best compare it to is drowning. Imagine you are at sea. There’s been a shipwreck. You can only keep afloat by paddling. The sun burns you, and the sea is cool. Your arms and legs are getting tired.

Better to sink and end the pain.

Or so I felt.

I had just completed a three month long project I called the Woodshed, an intensive practice period. During May, I accomplished almost nothing. Then, the end of school came: I had a week of teacher training to suffer through, followed by a week of vacation in the Baltimore area.

Months ago, I planned on starting recording for my third Jamendo album in June. As of today, I have plans, but no tracks. As I said in my first article, the album is partially named for that drowning feeling I’ve had all year — La vie sous la mer (”Life Under the Sea”).

But last night, there was a solution.

During my sleep study, they started me on a therapy called CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure). I’m happy to report that it worked — I woke up this morning and, for once, didn’t feel like I’d been the piñata at a particularly psychotic kid’s birthday party. Even now, as I sit here writing this, I see it is nearly 1 pm — the time I have been conking out. But I’m wide awake.

For me, it’s a new beginning. Enter Sandman, and this time with open arms.

[This article was crossposted to my Dandelife blog.]

OK, in case you are interested in Pitch Class Sets, but not Python, below I’ve just posted a computer generated catalog of prime descendants for each of the 50 prime hexachords. If you want to know how I did it, you can read the technical details in my previous post. If you don’t care, but just want the results, just click the “Read the rest of this entry” link, if it appears below.

Here’s how to read the table. I’m using “compressed” notation, where the Pitch Class Set [0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10] would be written “02468A” (dozenal notation). This set, the whole tone scale, would be listed in the table below as follows:

02468A
  5: 02468
  4: 0246 0248 0268
  3: 024 026 048

This says “Set 02468A has one pentachord descendant. The single pentachord has three tetrachord descendants, listed here. These three tetrachords yield these three trichord descendants.”

By “descendants,” I mean unique prime forms derived from the original set by omission of a single element. Notice, because of the symmetry of the whole tone group, any note you remove results in the same five note group in prime form. However, once this bit of asymmetry is introduced, the number of variations escalates to three in successive generations.

I didn’t bother with groups of two or less — unless you’re writing “Chopsticks,” who cares

Read the rest of this entry »

Reading Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory by Joseph N. Straus (2005) last night, I became fascinated by the concept of inclusion lattices. Here’s the basics:

• Start with a given Pitch Class Set, for example [0, 1, 4, 7].
• If you remove one element at a time, you get four subsets: [1,4,7], [0,4,7], [0,1,7], and [0, 1, 4]
• However, each of these four subsets can be rewritten in prime form: [0, 3, 6], [0, 3, 7], [0, 1, 6], and [0, 1, 4].

The above is a bit awkward to look at. It’s better to write the results in a table, using the “compressed form” where [0, 1, 4, 7] is written as “0147″ (using the standard that the letter “A” will stand for pitch class 10 and “B” for pitch class 11, where needed):

0147
  3: 014 016 036 037

You’d read the above as “Pitch class set 0147 has four trichord relatives, 014, 016, 036, and 037.”

Now, not every subset will yield a unique prime form. In fact, for a highly symmetric group such as the augmented scale (014589), the six derived subsets all collapse to the same prime form: 01458 (Strauss, p. 96):

014589
  5: 01458

But the thing is, you can keep on going.  From 01458, you can find four distinct prime subsets; from this family of four tetrachords, you can find a family of three trichords.  The final table would look something like this:

014589
  5: 01458
  4: 0145 0148 0158 0347
  3: 014 015 037 048

This is the complete “inclusion lattice” for the augmented scale.  Each of the sets in the 5th, 4th, and 3rd tiers can be derived from the original by removal of a certain number of notes.

Neat concept.  However, there are 50 distinctive prime hexachords, and that’s a lot of computation to compile a library.

Fortunately, I’ve already been experimenting in this area, and have my new friend Python to share the work with.

The two Python listings below require my Pitch Class Set module, pcset.py (version 1.1, posted to this blog on 5.28.07).  I’m going to hide them behind a WordPress “more” tag; if you want to read more, click the link below.  Otherwise, stay tuned for the second part of this series, where I’ll just print the results.

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, I’m completing my series on guitar chord voicings.

This is the last set. I have published a separate page that indexes all four of the voicings pages:

Jazz Guitar Voicings

The voicings below are drop-2 versions of the chords from the melodic minor series.  I described the interchangeability of these chords in an earlier article.  As for the drop-2 part, the general rule is that these are voiced on the four middle strings (a, d, g, b).

The “archetype” of the chord is made by taking the closed form voicing of a given chord (for instance, F, Ab, C, E) and dropping the second highest note by an octave (giving C, F, Ab, E).

This works out better for the major series; the melodic minor series takes a bit more goosing to sound right.  For instance, take a look at one of my favorites — the first voicing for Cm69 = C, Eb, A, D.  It has nothing to do with the traditional definition of “drop-2″, but fit in with the other chords so well I adapted it anyway.  That’s why this series is longer than the others.

As always, all the possible melody notes are harmonized on the highest string.  And remember, be a good partner for your bass player — keep your lowest note out of their range.  Your voicings will sound crisper if you give the bassist space.

Here’s the chart:

Some of you may be wondering why I’ve chosen La vie sous la mer as the title for my third Jamendo album. There are many reasons for choosing “life under the sea.”

Certainly, it is a metaphor, especially for emotion. However, a deeper level of meaning comes from the artwork I’ve chosen for the cover, a mermaid drawn by a former student of mine.

Mermaids span two worlds — land and water. Like the mermaid, I also span two worlds — science and music. Look further: I am also biracial (American Indian and white). So the mermaid theme definitely holds an attraction for me.

However, there’s one really big factor I haven’t mentioned yet.

The sea is also death. For the past year, I feel like I have been drowning. La vie sous la mer, “life under the sea,” for me is that feeling of sinking downward and watching the last rays of the surface world dwindle away to a faint blue glow.

Last night I finally found an explanation, and a possible solution.

The clue was my sudden onset, two months ago, of high blood pressure (I wrote about it on my Dandelife blog a month ago). I went to my doctor, and while discussing my symptoms (always being tired, waking without feeling rested, etc.), he suddenly asked, out of nowhere, “Is your wife complaining about your snoring?”

Up until that point, the subject hadn’t even been brought up. But yes, for the past year, the snoring problem had been getting worse.

See, I thought being tired all the time, snoring, and having high blood pressure were just the general gripes you got for being an old geezer. Now, back up a minute — I’m 38, the same age as Neil Armstrong when he landed on the Moon. 38 isn’t so bad.

But I feel like I’m 98 most of the time.

See what I meant about drowning? Imagine every day a struggle to dogpaddle, tread water, and hug the surface. You’d get exhausted pretty quickly.

My doctor sent me to a pulmonary specialist named Dr. Greenberg. Last night, I stayed overnight at the hospital for a sleep study. They wired me up to a bunch of machines that monitored my brainwaves, heart rate, blood oxygen, etc.

And they found it:

Sleep Apnea.

And apparently, for me, it happens the most during REM sleep — exactly when it can do the most harm.

I go back for another study next week, on Monday. I’ve been feeling like a drowning man for the last year; could this be the life preserver?

[This article was crossposted to my Dandelife blog.]

Well, my plan to take the week off to write music went a bit differently than expected. I ended up climbing two mountains (don’t worry, they were short), walking about 28 miles of hiking trails, and dodging the insane by blending in. I’m going to be posting the story to my Dandelife blog, but if you want a sort of preview, have a look at my first entry after the break.

For the first time in months, I shut off my computer. Because of the threat of thunderstorms while I was away, I powered down the entire system. That mean shutting down my Bittorrent client (Azureus) for the first substantial amount of time since November 2006.

When my first album, evolution, was published on Jamendo, I downloaded copies myself so that I could always maintain a set of seeds for the .ogg and .mp3 versions. I did the same thing months later when handmade came out. Since then, my computer has only been rebooted during the monthly backup session — usually only a few hours. Meaning, I broke a chain of 172 consecutive days during which seeds for my albums were always available.

My client is back up now. I was a bit worried that my downtime would hose my download totals. Instead, this is what I found today:

Despite my absence, as of today, I have had over 892 downloads — 89 more than last month, or about 11% growth. Not too bad. I was afraid that taking time off to write a really supreme album next time would sort of put me on the sidelines; instead, the community sharing tools on Jamendo seem to be keeping the albums visible.

So, my plans for the third album continue. I’ve got a theme and some new ideas. What remains is to take my fragments and make them whole. That will be my focus until August.

The woodshed period is over; I now begin La vie sous la mer.

I’m holed up somewhere writing music for this summer’s recording effort.  I’ll be back online about June 18th or so.

Just a quick update on some current and future projects:

Python

Most of my posts in the past month have been about Python programming.  I am developing several small projects as I learn the language:

• The pitch class sets series, which I plan to implement in a graphical interface.
• A new program I’m calling chordinateur, which generates chord voicings given a brief description (such as “Cmaj7″).
• If I can develop the two above, I want to be able to interface them together — for example, specifying the chord I want as [0,1,3,7] and finding some acceptable voicings (in context).
• Finally, something specifically related to my Dandelife blog, which I’ll have to do a lot more research on to get right.

Python has proven to be just as advertised — fast and easy to program, with many features and abilities I just didn’t expect.  I like it better than any other language I’ve met, and believe me, that’s saying a lot.

In addition, I found the act of programming to be a powerful learning tool in itself — I understand pitch class sets much better, having actually programmed functions to implement the main concepts.

Music Theory

Why all this focus on pitch class sets?  My next two albums will be very jazz oriented.  I am learning advanced music set theory for my future compositions — possibly to be introduced in 2008.  There’s a lot to learn, and a lot of experimentation to do until I get the “feel” for pitch class sets.  It would be highly premature to jump into them compositionally this summer.

Plus, over the years, I’ve gotten so familiar with the standard scales of jazz that they’ve actually begun to seem sort of limiting.  I think pitch class theory is a bit like the discovery of a whole new rack of spices — not a replacement for good cooking, but certainly required for memorable creations.

Jamendo

This summer, I’m going to start writing songs and recording tracks for my third Jamendo album, tentatively called La vie sous la mer (”Life under the sea”).  I already have the artwork, thanks to a former student of mine named Kathryn Richardson.

When will it be released?  Right now that exists as a range of possibilities — sometime between August and November 2007.  I’m not in a rush — I want it to be the best I’ve ever done.  (Just in case there’s not much future left, know what I’m saying?)

DMusic

My next DMusic album is going to be more experimental and dangerous.  I enjoyed doing FAWM last February; I’d like to do something along similar lines to the style I was developing then — focusing on the bass, establishing a groove, and flying over it with insane improvisation.  It’s not for everyone, but some of the songs that came out of that period have become personal favorites of mine (for example, La ballade par hasard or Organometallic).

Strangely, one of my more highly commented songs on DMusic is a sort of sneak preview:  Through the Dark Sun.

Conclusion

It’s going to be a busy summer.  Personally, I’m struggling with fatigue right now — I just seem to be fighting too many battles, particularly on the health front.  Since school let out, I’ve spent most of my time in doctor’s offices or the gym or somewhere else trying to outrun the Grim Reaper.  I guess the thing that’s on my mind lately is . . . I just want to leave something worthwhile behind.