who's that girl?

I recently purchased Photoshop and Illustrator, and I've been going to town.

Here's a little Photoshop weirdness for you...

Back in the early '90s, there was a Lollapalooza tour where Perry Farrell proclaimed there would be a booth where a computer would take your portrait and then change your gender. He promised it would all be some trippy, mind-bending fun.

Sounded pretty cool to me.

When that Lollapalooza tour came to Deer Creek outside Indianapolis, the booth wasn't there anymore. I was disappointed, to say the least.

But now, we have the means of production, comrades!

I took a photo of my 19-year-old self, and morphed things to find out how I would have looked as a 19-year-old girl.

And damn, I'm a cutie!

Guys, if any of you try this, don't be surprised if you find yourself wanting to climb into the photo so you can make out with yourself.

It looks like I would have been one of those pixie-type girls.

Illustrator Stuff
Here's a music-related mandala I've been working on in Illustrator. The original was black & white, and then I got busy with neon stroke effects and color gradients. I want to figure out how to get silvery, iridescent, chrome-like textures, like you see on psychedelic album covers, and I'm definitely on the outskirts of being able to do it. I was able to work up a gold metallic texture for the "AUM" text at the top...

Yogi's proclaim that the "Aum" (or "Om") mantra is the primordial sound from which all other sounds emanate, the ultimate cosmic keynote or do of the cosmic scale.

The symbol in the center is the Tibetan glyph for "Aum."

Something about it fit with my work on the Lydian Chromatic Concept and key-based ear training; there's something mandala-like about how keys, chords, and scales all nest within one another in the Concept, and I find myself overcome with these wheels-within-wheels visualizations of the relationships.

The Circle of 5ths is a long-standing symbol of key relationships, the roundness of it lends itself to a mandala. The C at the top is slightly bigger and has the burst, because in this case C is the vibration from whence arises all the other musical tones via the overtonal vibrations. With the possible exception of the subdominant F, which is the "reciprocal" of the tonic, and in Indian sargam is designated ma, the counterpart to the overtonal, masculine pa of the 5th degree; by "reciprocal," I refer to the process where you sing a note below the tonic—you contain and envelop the tonic, providing a low fundamental vibration it does not intrinsically possess, rather than riding a vibration already present within the tonic.

This means that "horizontal" music, as we understand it in the West, contains a potent feminine energy and is in a state of duality.

As opposed to the unified, "vertical" nature of the Lydian Chromatic Concept, which is a purely overtonal, masculine sort of energy. Strangely enough, the masculine energy of "vertical" music is a passive energy.

Hmmm...

In Harmonic Experience, Mathieu maps the Lydian Mode as entirely overtonal, except for the 6th degree, which he maps as a reciprocal derivation from the 3rd; but, if you were to use a more Pythagorean formula, like George Russell specifies, then it would indeed be completely overtonal.

The differences between these two "maps" of the musical universe are interesting, given that "a map is not the territory," as they say. Mathieu's take on the subdominant 4th degree as a feminine energy below the tonic is intriguing, and it feels right to me, while Russell places the subdominant 4th degree as the most "out" note (except for the b2) on a chain extending upward.

If the Circle of 5ths represents the relationships in an accurate way, it's like the 4th degree is so far out, it circles around and comes up from below.

Very strange.

Then again, the equal-tempered "circle" of the Circle of 5ths is a purposeful, man-made construct; if you stack up 5ths using the overtones, which are slightly sharp, you get a spiral instead of a circle.

So, you can derive a 4th degree, using nothing but the overtones, but it is indeed a distant note, and it would be a definitely different note from a true reciprocal subdominant.

Looks like there are at least two diagrams here that I can busy with in Illustrator to represent my point...

And when I figure out how to do it, I'll post some clips of music I've been working on, so you can hear what I mean.

Anyway, equal temperament allows for perfectly symmetrical note relationships, and I used this mandala to map a few of them out; when you draw out lines to connect the notes of various augmented, diminished, and whole tone structures, the symmetrical nature of those tonal structures is plain to the eye.

Here's one that wasn't Web-optimized, but I still kind of like how the colors converted...

Enjoy!