The Colour Spectrum of Scales and Modes - Milton Mermikides

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on this gray day. Hopefully we can bring some color in. So among humanity's greatest inventions, I think the alphabet ranks the highest. The idea of a simple set of objects that can combine to create complex thoughts and ideas and even emotions. And that also includes numbers and colors and what a poet can do with letters. What a mathematician does with a simple set of numbers, what an artist can do with a set of colors a musician can do with a collection of pictures or scales. These all have a long history, but scales is among the oldest alphabet we have. The Gresham College lecture that you're listening to right now is giving you knowledge and insight from one of the world's leading academic experts making it takes a lot of time. But because we want to encourage a love of learning, we think it's well worth it. We never make you pay for lectures, although donations are needed. All we ask in return is this. Send a link to this lecture to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click the follow or subscribe button from wherever you are listening right now. Now let's get back to the lecture. So our journey through scale starts 35,000 years ago. In the Paleolithic era, humans had made it to Europe. It was bitterly cold, wooly mammoths were roaming the earth and the Neanderthals were still around. And in this cave in, which is now Germany, Holly Fells, which means hollow rock, they found this beautiful object, a flute carved from the radial bone of this awesome Griffin Vulture with a 2.5 meter wingspan. And we know it's a musical instrument and not any other object 'cause look how beautifully those finger holes have been carved just perfectly for finger placement. And there's also signs of measurement as if this wasn't the first flute that had been made. So what sounds come out of it? Well, when we reconstruct it, we find that there is, there are six notes that emerge, but the top and bottom one are an Octa apart double the frequency. And the interior ones are the scale, what's called the major pentatonic. But it has many names 'cause it's been found and refound over the ages. Let's listen to how it sounds on a replica of the flute. This might have echoed through the caves of Paleolithic Europe. Why does it sound so pleasant and accessible to us? And even someone 35,000 years ago? Well, even though they were different in many ways, perhaps they share a lot of our biology and our experience of sound. So I'm gonna play you some sounds now. And what this is, is a sensory dissonance curve. It's basically one note against another and some will sound more gritty and others will find sound more smooth. It'll be rough and smooth and it might follow this contour. So let's listen to this and see if you share this experience. You will notice that there's a massive peak at the front, what we might call a minor second in that area. And then there are drops, a significant one at the fourth, and this particularly the fifth where it drops really low. But by the time we finally reach the octave, it's gone completely, almost like it's the same note again. It's double the frequency. And maybe we and our 35,000 year old ancestors share that experience of sound because the roots and the octave are so close. This view of a scale as a ladder where the name comes from scarla is not that accurate because the roots and the octave are kind of the same. It might be better to think of this as a Um, circle. An octave circle where the roots and the octave match each other, A bracelet, a necklace of notes so that we go round the scale. But once we get to the octave, we're back at the root again. They're identical. Actually the best view is to think of it in three dimensions as a helix, which maintains that circularity. But there's an identity of these various pitch classes here. So whenever we look at the circle, we can imagine we're looking down a helix, a coil, and we'll use this octave representation today. And this reveals some secrets of that pentatonic. For example, if you squint, you might notice that it's actually symmetrical Along this angle. Not only that, but the gaps between the notes are only two length, a long minor third and three short major seconds. As for the interior angles, there's a major third and the rest are perfect fifths up and down. If you recall, a perfect fifth is the most consonant non tive note we have. And this configuration packs in as many perfect fifths as you can in the octave. It's the most constant. You can make five notes. And somehow our paleolithic ancestor found it and we keep finding it over and over again. So really it's more like an arc of fifths joined by a major Third, let's continue our journey. We're about 9,000 years ago in D in ancient China, north China, near the Yellow River. And there's this extraordinary settlement that lasted for 12 centuries. There they cultivated rice and millet. Um, they had a proto form of writing. They, um, were were among the first humans to invent alcohol. And they lived the right rifle age of 40, which is really impressive for the age stone. Age 40 is the new a hundred I guess. And among the amazing artifacts we find in that period is this awesome lineage of flutes 33. Here's just a selection of them, which is a treasure trove for musicologists.'cause it shows the evolution of scales in this region. They're carved from this beautiful bird's bones, the red crown crane, which I'm kind of obsessed with at the moment. And what we find is that they added more notes into the octave. And also it seems that some of the flutes were tuned together so could people could play together, which is quite awesome. They even found this bone sh, which just played incremental pitches maybe as a form, early form of pitch reference. And this flute at the bottom, you'll notice there are two holes there. And the reason may be that the A five and the A six are really sharp. And so someone added a hole just to tune it in. It's just awesome to think this. So let's see what happens as we go through these flutes. So the first we find has six notes, but only four unique pitch classes. Still it's got a symmetry to it. Then again, they found a major pentatonic, quite chirpy that one. And then we move to this one, which is the earliest playable musical instrument yet found. So what you'll hear is the actual sounds of this instrument being played. So you can imagine it being played 8,000 years ago. Then we start seeing this semitone introduced that harsh interval at the beginning. Quite an odd scale and you can know it's odd 'cause look at where the fifths are spread out. So there's a little more dissonance here. And then our final one in the series is this incredible fluke, which had this nine pitch note collection all in a chain of fifths. And because of that complexity, they could create seven note scales, quite familiar to us, different ones from the same flute, early scale practice. I guess let's skip a few years to the Iron Age ancient Babylon, where this very Indiana Jones like object was found with these enigmatic symbols on. It was first thought to be a form of astronomical um, uh, reference. But this growing consensus, that consensus that this is a fact, the first piece of music theory, those seven points of that won key heto Graham are thought to be the strings of a liar. And what that matrix below, which has all these numbers are tuning instructions, there's another tablet which supports the idea that the player is instructed to tune those strings so that they are no longer rough. So they are smooth, which means that they're in perfect fifths. So let's take the yellow one, go four to one, five to two, and so on. So let's simulate this chap tuning up a little bit out. Thank You. And now we have a complete scale. What of these other numbers? Well, they actually just rotate that Heto Graham so that they fill out the 12 notes of the octave. And individually they produce what we would call modes rotations of that diatonic scale. So what's happening here, we are building fifths, six of them in fact packing them in. And then finally we close the circle with a tritone, quite a dissonant interval. If we range these in fifths, we note that it produces another arc of fifths, the diatonic scale l. So you'll see that the Babylonian tablet is an arc of seven fifth, but if you recall, our vulture flute is an arc of fifths. So they've completed the cycle of fifth. And if that pattern of five blacks and seven whites looks familiar, it's because it's imprinted onto our keyboards. So the next time you see a musical keyboard or even touch it, you can think of this story of bone and stone imprinted upon it more than constructing a scale. What we are also constructing is a set of degrees, melodic steps. And this took a while to, for music notation to catch up with. For example, this is an early form of music notation called, which used nomes, which are just melodic shapes. And there were sort of ways of remembering a shape of melody, but not very specific. And as ever, it was a teacher who sorted out this problem. Guido Deto in about a thousand ad who adapted a piece of text and a melody to try and lock in these melodic notes. And so what he did was add a for each start of each line, it would be a note in the scale. You'll see what's going on as I play it. There's the birth of Souled. Now Utz is very hard to sing. So later on Giovanni Batista Doni changed Utz into doe. It's his own name. He stuck his name in there, which is pretty cheeky. Um, c um, later had its own note that was added to it. But because it shared a a sound with, so it got changed to tea by a English music educator in the 18th, 19th century. So now it could be drunk with jam and bread. So these six notes, again, give us a line of symmetry. They create a tone, tone, semitone tone, tone, Tone, The juicy semitone. And that semitone matters. This hexa cord is hugely powerful. For example, it could be transposed to different notes, which would introduce different accidentals changes in the fundamental harmony. And people like Palini made absolutely beautiful music by manipulating this hexa cord. Oh, So the transposition of the hexa cord really mattered, but what also mattered is what the final note was, what felt like home within the hexa cord. This piece by egham, it's just so beautiful. It's called a mass on any mode. And what it is, it's a piece which has fixed notes upon it, but the choir gets to choose what mode to sing in. They get to choose the clef. So it's actually packs in different versions into one, uh, one score. It's the first generative piece I guess. So you'll hear this piece in three different modes and you can see how it radically changes its emotional impact, the beautiful. Why do these feel different? Why is it that it matters where the semitone is and these degrees? Why do we get a different emotional effect when we play two chords that are almost identical? When we move from a minor key to a major key, it feels like the light is breaking through the clouds. When we move from major to minor, it feels like a shadow is cast like the sun is going down, But nobody wants to know him. They can see that he's just a fool and he never gives an answer. But the fool sees the sun going down, Sees the sun going down. I just realized that that's good. Why? There are three broad answers here. It could be that this is just only cultural. It could be that we just learn to associate major with happy things and minor and it's just an arbitrary connection. This is called a valence arousal plane, which are, it's a simple way of mapping out our emotions, whether they're active, have the energy or they're passive, whether they're positive or negative or negative. So if we're very, uh, it's very positive and we're active, we're excited. If we're, if it's positive and um, passive, then we are serene, angry is active and negative and so on. So how do musical parameters map onto this? Well, broadly speaking, they do this dissonance instability. And the minor keys tend to go to negative valences. Um, but the arousal dimension is really universal. It hardly changes across cultures. The horizontal is a little bit more malleable, but still the major key and the me key are, are seem to be imprinted more than is culturally explicable. So how about language? When we're happy, we speak with a wider range, greater leaps and a higher averaged tone. When we're sad we have smaller interval changes and lower, oh, you brought, you brought another guitar or the opposite. So here's, um, the interesting thing is that major melodies have wider ranges and gaps'cause of the way that, um, notes and melodies progress succeed each other. We find that there are bigger gaps in major melodies and smaller ones in minor melodies, particularly the harmonic minor. So this mirrors our language, but not completely. So let's look at another angle. Biology, there's something inherent in a major chord in a minor chord that makes us feel differently. And it could be the harmonic series which imprints a maness. So when we, a musical instrument resonates on its own, we are hearing that major underpinning. In fact harmonics 4, 5, 6 play a major triad. It's like an airport announcement, but if we subvert that, literally turn it upside down, we get a minor triad, your flight is canceled <laugh>. So there's something unnatural perhaps about minor and it sort of grates against us in the background. So that gives us an op opportunity to think about intervals as agreeing or disagreeing with this background sense, this cloud of major versus minor. So if perfect fifths up, give us a certain feeling and major thirds give us a certain feeling, we can build out intervals from a roots and fifths and in major thirds and we can build upon them spanning outwards into this tapestry of emotional response. And then we can do the opposite. We can go down fifth. So we insert that darker flavor into our pitch collection. These build triads, but they also build scales Which have this complex emotive effect. They're called brighter scale degrees and darker, but each one of them are, are different. And what's interesting is how we perceive them is that we sort of categorize them and we see the octave, we zone out. This feels like a majory second. This feels like a minor second. This feels like a minor sixth or, and these overlap in really complex ways. So what I'm gonna play you is a sort of simulation of what might be going on inside you. As you're listening to these notes together. I'm gonna play you a major triad then a minor triad and see how that they feel. These emotions will come up here due to this lovely, these lovely algorithms that Dennis ham kindly let me use tonight. And then what we'll do is play one note that say a major six on the major chord and a major six on the minor. And it will change. Its, even though it's the same note, it will change its expression. So major content, sad. Now A six on a major reassure, but on a minor Poignant A seventh on a major expectation Yearning, A tritone floaty and on a minor mysterious. And this ambiguity is on the left, the possible chords that it could be. It is at the heart of our musical experience. And a culture that really understood this combinatorial effect of degrees is South Indian cathartic music who build scales using this wonderful system. So they're types of second types of thirds, types of minor third types of major third and so on. And you can construct scales by walking through this pathway. So you can do that now. You can build your own scale by just taking a pathway through this and picking from these various scale degree types, let's listen to a couple of them. And the gorgeous chay, which is major at the bottom and minor at the top. There are in fact 72 pathways through this and all of them are used in this Mela Carta system. Those are the three we listen to. And our little major scale is over here. If you're wondering. So these scale degrees matter in our musical experience. Now we can make scales by just choosing scale degrees, but what's extraordinary about this ancient diatonic scale is it has a property that's called maximal independence. It means that when we rotate it, it never looks the same until we get back to the top again. What that means practically for musicians is that every rotation creates a new combination of degrees and thus a new emotional landscape for us to explore. So now the fun begins. Let's go through these rotations, these modes, and see how they feel. We'll start arbitrarily here. And what's beautiful about this is that I sent out a survey to you all. Um, I hope some of you filled that out. And so all the emotional responses that you see here come from you, not from me. And the consensus is remarkable about how these modes feel. It, it still baffles me. In fact, the reason I did music at all is someone showed me the modes when I was 17 and I just couldn't believe that it'd be possible for one scale to have such different emotional effects. But look at this melancholic, melancholy, sweet, sad, calm, beautiful, foggy mts. So what is Dorian? Well, a natural minor scale sounds like this, but Dorian has a major a little bit more hope. Let's listen to it in context Are Notice that the melody is not this, it's this, it's sad, but it has some hope. And because it has that hope, it means that you can hear it over and over again. It's used a lot for vamps in jazz and in rock like Dorian Gray, the Dorian mode never gets old. Let's turn the dial one more time. And we get this, the frit mode, it difference from minor because of that flattened second, which adds tension. Here's a natural minor, here's your responses. Tension regretful, confronting loss with resolve, but with a flattened second. That's the peak of our tension in that curve. And it creates this dark color that is of course irresistible to the metal community. I was waiting for the trail. Um, that sound didn't start with metal of course, in fact it's connected to North African macame. There's a four note scale, the hija tetra chord, which you would all know that spread into and Lucia as part of flamenco music. And there's a whole host of scales that sound like frig in with different added notes. A major version. Um, one which I call the flamenco scale, has a major and a minor third and a major and minor seventh, which allows the root to be trapped from both, both sides and a claustrophobic clutch. Yes, Let's turn the dial again. Lydian hears your associations dreaminess floating, being happy, but detached from the world. Why? Well, a major scale sounds like this, but Lydian has its race force. You've heard it in every film about two thirds of the way through. You'll Hear this when our hero realizes there's more to the world. Let's hear it in context. And it also has associations with floating. It's used for depictions of space or weightlessness because of this sharpened forth. Let's turn the dial again. Here we have the mixolydian. Here's your thoughts about it. Heroism, confidence. Stoicism. It's happy, it's like major, but there's something about that flat and seventh, which means it doesn't want anything. Doesn't expect anything in life. It has a resolve about it. So here's major and Ian, I, Eric Satie wrote one of his op in the Ilian mode. So beautiful And it has a sort of americanness to it. I dunno why. And it also has this rustic charm too. I think of it as the older sibling of Dorian who's a little bit more happy about life. She Turn it again and we get a alien, which are the same notes of natural minor, but they differ from a minor mode. Usually when we, we play in a minor key, we change the sixth and the seventh. So we have leading tones into the root and melodic fluency. But alien is starkly minor at the top, which adds these sort of sentiments. Resignation. It's so interesting. It's, it's sad and it won't move from it. Oof. Cheer up. It's the word bleak keeps coming up. It's like this bleak alien landscape. And when played loud, it has this cathartic, powerful, beautiful grief. Turn it again. And we discover the ian. Now every family has a weirdo I should know. And this is the family's weirdo. Why?'cause it lacks that, that all important. Fifth, and whoever answers the survey, whatever their background, a child, an adult, or their musical knowledge, they recognize this lack of the fifth something's missing, unstable, no harmony. It is quite hard to make this work as a mode. It needs a lot of repetition because of the lack of that fifth. So you get chords like this one. There are examples of it. Stem style one more time. And we end up at Ionan. Now Ionan is often ignored. It's just major. But in fact I would argue that the modal use of the major scale is wholly different from major key music. Look how many sunlights come into the responses. Sunlight, sunlight, home arrivals, sunlight, contentment, looking up at the sky, sunlight, sunshine, and light. I left a few of the sunlight out 'cause I couldn't fit them on. Why is that? Well, it feels content, but when we play the third and fourth degree together, there's a shimmer that adds, which is just irresistibly summary, normal major scale. But let's add those. And you get chords like this. I didn't know what example to play here. So I used them all and just put them on top of each other from Copeland to Gretzky to Pink Floyd data, some video game music you can text. So Is It not extraordinary that one scale produces all these emotional colors and even times of the day, it's the sort of spectrum of human experience. In fact, we can organize them in terms of positivity and negativity or times of the day, but they connect in all sorts of interesting ways. For example, if we arrange them in terms of brightness, Lillian mode looks like that. But we're only one step away from Ionian. We drop the fourth and we come Ionian, drop the seventh, we get Mixolydian, drop the third, we get Dorian drop the sixth AOL drop the second Fri in the fifth. Rin. You might think we're done, but we haven't dropped the root yet. And when you drop the root, it is lidian and the cycle continues. I like to think of it at times of day around the planet, light and dark circling in that way. And if we think of them as a positive and negative side, it's also really interesting thing that comes up. If we take the brightest mode, Lydian, remember brightness and happiness has got sharper notes we can think of its evil twin. If we go up a tone, we can imagine another scale that happens by reflecting around the root. So what is the evil twin of Lidian? What comes out when we invert lidian is the darkest mode. Ian, it's its reflection. It's no fluke because the next brightest becomes the next darkest mix. Lidian, alien. What's left, Dorian? So what happens to Dorian? It becomes itself, it's palindromic. You can see that reflection point in the center. And again, look to your piano and you'll see that reflection point in the middle of d Dorian. I find it astonishing that all these colors come from just one scale and that one scale is itself ancient and imprinted into a clay tablet. It gets a little more complicated than that because adding scale degrees give us emotion, but removing them does also Japanese music and art has this concept of mar, which is this positive use of space. It's making, um, space matter. The symbol for it is absolutely beautiful a door through the cre of which the moonshine peeps in. How beautiful is that? And here's the concept when it comes to scales. If we take a Dorian framework, but we remove whether it's happy or sad, and we remove whether we expect anything from it, and we get this A wholly different experience. Let's do the same with frien. So beautiful Scales are essential in jazz playing where a harmonic template represented like that as used as a vehicle for expression. And then if anyone's tried to learn jazz, you'll, you'll know that there are scales associated with these chords. So for example, you're given C seven and then you learn, what what can I play on C seven? And the answer is you can play core tones, guide tones, mix all these different scales. It's not that helpful because they all add up to every note <laugh>. So the answer is anything you like. But we can think of this more in a more sophisticated way. If we take these scale degrees, we can think of them as in terms of how in or out they are compared to the chord. So there's this central zone which really spell out the chord and the rest are extrapolations of it. And so experienced jazz players create these trajectories of in and out through this chord. And scales can be thought of ma more zones, overlapping zones, implying these scales. Scales are a consequence of the melody rather than the other way round. This is my good friend Steve Hamilton improvising on one chord C seven. And you can hear these colors being brought out. We end our journey through scales modes with Revelle. This is his notebook. Isn't that beautiful? Revelle was an incredible composer. He was quite unusual because despite his, uh, working for decades and being an absolutely brilliant, um, and dedicated composer, he producers not that much compared to his colleagues, his good friend Stravinsky. Look how cool they look. Called him the Swiss watchmaker for his technical perfection. And he spent sometimes decades sculpting and re orchestrating to get this perfect color. What's unusual is that this sort of care you would think would result in careful music. But what he really did was distill emotion into these beautiful extraordinary colors. So he managed to produce a sort of iridescent beauty. This is his notepad where he wrote this very sad poem of George Moore's out. And he wrote this in Holland Park, which is very meaningful to me and it's actually reminds me of, of of peacocks and his music, which had this irid iridescence, I'm gonna play your recording of him playing 110 years ago. And he's playing le was or tourist while you hear these scintillating colors. And then the elegance devastating simplicity of the paan and the P for a dead princess. Wait, Wait, Sorry, I couldn't resist that. And he had a real connection with people, les him with George Gershwin. He loved jazz. Um, Paul Wittgenstein Wittgenstein, the older brother of the philosopher Ludwig Paul was a accomplished pianist who lost his right arm in the war. And Revelle wrote him Concerto for left hand only. It's extraordinary piece. This is the bottom left is dedicated to Stravinsky. His pupil, Vaughn Williams, who appears in this lecture series, um, was greatly influenced by Rael. And Revelle adored his teacher foray. So much so that he wrote foray a piece dedicated to him, not just dedicated to to him, but he took forays name and using the French cryptogram system assigned notes to it forwards and backwards. Of course. Why not? Let's hear it later in the piece. Revelle goes through these beautiful colors. He goes from minor to the parallel Ionian and then this extraordinary sound world. That scale is this nore natural too. You'll see it looks kind of like a diatonic scale, but the semitone have crept closer together. What that means is that the major modes are brighter and the minor modes are darker. And Val loved this sound. He used several modes of it, one of which is named after him, the darkest one here. And the chesia is in the middle as the palindromic version of Dorian. Throughout his life, Revelle suffered from insomnia, confusion. And his favorite activity was, um, his favorite activity was swimming. And one day he found that his limbs wouldn't work. It turns out he had lesions to the left hemisphere of his brain. And it resulted in aphasia the inability to connect thoughts with alphabets. Firstly in terms of language where he'd forget words. And then in terms of musical symbols, he used to lament that he had still so much to say that was trapped in his brain. He still continued working. And um, one of his last pieces was Bolero, an infamous piece, especially if you are a percussionist or a cellist. It's such an unusual piece. It may be influenced by his aphasia, we don't know. But he repeats the same rhythm 169 times and he just has one melody, uh, simple 16 bar melody that just repeats over and over and over. He felt that it had an insistent quality that he had just had to get it out there. So how does it, how does he make it interesting is that his orchestration is just extraordinary. I've talked about it before, but his use of modes, he pulls colors onto this melody, which are just phenomenon and um, in a way it's a sort of distilled Emotion. In the absence of conventional musical structure is just whittled emotion down just to color orchestral and modal color. So what we'll hear now is the last part of Bolero just two minutes long, which will have a live analysis of the scales being used as well as your thoughts about those scales as they pass by Rebel's. Life was tinged with this deep sadness, but also great joy. Perhaps it's like a scale where you need those flatter notes to create the brighter mode elsewhere. But I also hear in his music a triumph of humanity's ability to build a language to express the deepest and greatest range of emotion even when words fail. Thank you. Okay, so 59 minutes ago Mark Reed asked, uh, pentatonics comma Yes. Made of stacked fifths are everywhere. That's not a question, but a statement. Great.<laugh> <laugh>. I'm glad you said that, I Should have said that. Ha ha. Um, stacking two more fifths that we get Lidian mode. Well we also get that diatonic cycl, which is what that whole circle was. But yes, you get the Lydian mode of view, count the lowest one as the root And he says, might Lydian mode have preceded Ionian mode due to this simplicity? Oh, That's a great question, isn't it? Yes. That's a great question. Well, we don't, we don't know so much about prehistoric music and um, of course it would be different everywhere. Um, there is a sense of coming home to a tonic that seems to appear in many places and the Ionian mode does so in a more voice led manner than the lidian, which is more floaty. So you the two Semites, when they move in the Ionian mood mode capture back to the home, which they don't in the Lidian. Um, but that said, it seems in a way that Dorian might be the first mode just because of its sim symmetry and its sort of balanced nature of, of minor and major tones we don't know, which is wonderful. It feels instinctively like that's the case, but we can't prove it. Would that be fair to say? That's right. Yes. And and I like the way that you talk about how, I mean these things don't evolve in a sort of, uh, a unified monolithic way because the world of music has evolved globally in different directions, especially. Yeah, Those Chinese fruits are extraordinary To see something like that, that seems linear and it seems impossible. It does. It seems like it's made up, but It does. And I can't believe how old it is. I know it's, it is mind blowing. Great. Um, we have another question here. Um, in the ma carta tones, the root note is C but it actually starts in g for each scale. Yeah. Is that just to make it easier to understand? Yes. Or is that what a C is for them? Um, well they don't use the word C so <laugh>. No they don't. That's a great answer. No. And um, uh, yeah there are some pitch references 'cause there are instruments played to that drone. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative> and a Yes. It's usually around the G area. They don't use the note c. It's uh, a different solf edge system that's brought around that. Um, yes, I mean it's unusual because it's uh, it is as we discovered in the last lecture, it is, uh, monophonic music. So there's a drone and which allows not only these, but each of those to be micro tone tuned for further expression. What I didn't mention is that you can go up one of those scales and down another greatly enhancing the number of mm-Hmm<affirmative> it's what you do with it as well as selecting it. Exactly. Is it not? Okay. Um, gosh, this all moved very quickly. Uh, where do you get the transcripts please? Um, you, um, if you have registered for the lecture, which presumably you have 'cause you're watching, you can download it from the website. I believe it's also emails to everyone that's either registered online or in person. So a link to it And every lecture be sent to you and every lecture has a page as well. Yes, it's quite easy to find, which has the video and a transcript. Nice, easy question to answer there. Um, back to the difficult ones, <laugh>. Thank you. I have synesthesia. So hearing the samples on your lecture really resonated with me. Amazing. Also, a nice easy question. There's An upcoming lecture we hope on synesthesia and mm-Hmm.<affirmative> light and music. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative>. Um, somebody is asking what was the difference between the first set of seven scales? Uh, oh my goodness. It's going at the normal ones and the second set. Ah, the weird ones. Okay. So, um, I mentioned that the semitone on the are in different places. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative>. And in the diatonic mode, those semitones are as far away from each other as is possible. They're not opposite, but they're as far away as they can be. What the acoustic modes that we looked at do is that they have, um, hold tones and semitones, but the semitones are one step closer and it transforms the completely. And of course there are other scales too, with their own set of modes. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative>. I thought I'd keep it short. No, no, no, it's super. Um, Jason asks, can you speak, this is complicated to the relationship between modes and the Overtone series? Yes. That's a, That's another lecture really. Well, I mean, that's a great, its a Great it's question. It's, it's a very good question. Yes. It seems however that, I mean overtones, uh, are really, uh, beautiful and important. It seems however, that the lower overtones are far more important than the higher overtones. I know I love just intonation and so on, but it seems that the fifth and the third and maybe that flat and seventh make their way in, but as we go up, their influence, I think becomes, um, smaller just as a air volume in the Harmonic series diminishes. Yep. Super. Um, what did you mean <laugh>? The whole thing About the last hour? No, what did you mean about that being a difference between Ionian mode and the major scale? It's just the way it's used. There are seven notes and you could play, for example, you could play those seven notes by playing CFGC, which means that you're playing those, all those notes. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative>. But you're only creating thirds and fifths when you're using them. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative>, I use the term Ionian when it's more pan diatonic like Aaron Copeland does. So that you hear those die tones die, sorry, semitone rub against each other and so on. So it's more, um, pan diatonic. So introduces more, um, dissonant, um, into valic structures. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative>, Keep Going. You want to lie down?<laugh>. Uh, where would you say <laugh> musical systems, not based on the octave EEG Polynesian gamma land music fit into all of this? Yeah, great question. And um, I had to leave some things out and I had a section on de sea and the gamma land and the stretched octave, which we'll have to wait for another day. Um, so, uh, what's interesting though is that the gamt doesn't ignore the octave. In fact, they name the notes again at the octave. What they do is stretch a tuning of it, and they do that to create, uh, beats and resonance. So it's a al choice over a tuning choice, a tuning of those notes. So it's to create a color, a different type of color. They, however, still use a number of siphon notation to, uh, notate those notes. So the octaves exist. There are some cultures which don't name the same octaves or um, same names of those octaves, but they are notable by by how few there are. Super. And I'm going to ask one last question. Okay. This can be a trailer for a future lecture. Could you comment on Sabian's use of emotion and color within his compositions if you happen to know the artist? Yes. Well, Sri was a famous sin, so he talked about composing his painting. So, um, he had certain color associations, so would literally paint as he literally form visual elements as he composed Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> mine were arbitrarily linked just by some of the names that were in there. And that's interesting. I mean, I use the term color, but what's interesting about music is that we don't really have the words for how it feels those moments. So we have to use these loose analogies to get there. But for Sri and others, those were tightly, It was direct rather than a metaphor or, or some kind of displaced feeling. Yes. But again, um, we'll come back to Sri. Excellent. So Milton's next lecture is I think the 25th of April. I should remember these highly. Yeah. Is that right? 25th. The 25th of April when he'll be, this is the 25th of April When he'll be talking about Consonances and Dissonances. Do you want to say anything else about that? So there'll be another survey going about going out and it's about music that everyone thinks is bad, that you love music that everyone thinks is good that you hate, but most importantly what I call the beautifully ugly in music, the most scrunchie chords and rhythms that do everything for you. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that and we'll build that together. Fabulous. Well thank you so much everyone for coming. Can we thank Nelson again? Thank You. Thank you so much. Thank.