History of monz's "invention" of lattice software (was: compositional methods)

> From: X. J. Scott <xjscott@...>
> To: <crazy_music@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2001 7:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [cm] Re: compositional methods
>
>
> [Carl said to Joe:]
>
> > Like Paul and you, I also independently came up with the
> > animated lattice idea.
>
> Just for historical interest, I'd like to add that
> mclaren personally described his idea for this software
> to me in great detail and in the presence of Dr.
> Chalmers and Jonathan Glasier many years ago, before
> anyone else even started talking about these things. As
> far as I can tell, Brian invented the idea of dynamic
> multidimensional latticing software and I hope to see
> him properly acknowledged someday for his contribution.

> From: Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...>
> To: <crazy_music@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2001 7:27 PM
> Subject: Re: [cm] Re: compositional methods
>
>
> Yes credit to Brian
> And possibly a big footnote to John Whitney whose work implied such
> things!

Hi Jeff and Kraig,

While Brian and John Whitney certainly deserve props for any
historical precedence, please take note, as Carl emphasized,
that many of us have invented this wheel again separately and
independently.

For the record, here's my history in this regard:

I finally began digesting the theory in Partch's _Genesis of
a Music_ around 1982-83. It would still be more than a decade
before I knew anything of the work on lattice diagrams of
Fokker, Wilson, Mandelbaum, Johnston, or McLaren.

By the fall of 1984 I was auditing a computer music class with
Charles Dodge at Brooklyn College to try and figure out a way
to animate Partchian Tonality Diamonds on the computer screen
as a compositional and analytical tool. I had already come up
with the name "JustMusic" for the software project.

In the spring of 1993 I had the idea to plot a Partchian Tonality
Diamond in a way that made the center of each of Partch's cells
a point, and plot those points horizontally on a pitch-height
graph, so that something resembling a 7-white/5-black keyboard
pattern (but with slightly different geometry) could be painted
under the Tonality Diamond points-and-line-segments. [I thought
I had put a graphic of this on my website, but I don't see it
and don't have it handy to create now. Eventually.] This
"keyboard" diagram was to be part of the JustMusic on-screen
interface, but I also wanted (and still want) to create an
actual physical keyboard on this design.

Around March 1994, I realized that Ellis's Duodene diagram
was a prime-factor matrix, and modified some of the different
diagrams I had created based on Partchian Tonality Diamonds
into what I called JustMusic Matrices. I could only represent
a 2-dimensional (i.e., two prime-factor) array of pitches
on any given plane, and would stack other planes above and
below it like a ladder to represent other prime-factors.
This worked great for a 3-dimensional 7-limit system, but
not so well for larger-dimensional tuning resources. This
too was to be a part of the JustMusic software interface.

Around the same time, I came up with the idea for my
Planetary Graph, which plotted and 8ve as 360 degrees
around the circumference of a circle, and all the 8ve-invariant
microtonal pitches at points between. Again, another
JustMusic window.

Sometime later that year or thereabouts, I read the
_Perspectives of New Music_ article by John Fonville
describing Ben Johnston's notation, and saw the
lattice diagram Fonville included. So I realized that
what I was creating should really be called a "lattice",
and also got some new ideas on how to use different angles
(other than 90 degrees) to represent the relationships
between the prime axes.

Then in May 1998, still having read nothing by McLaren
or Erv Wilson, I was struggling with my own "lattice barrier"
and finally thought of the formula described in my webpages,
which finally gave me a way to lattice all the different
prime-factors I had come across in my historical research
(as I worked on my book from 1994-98) on the same huge
conceptual lattice. A year later, March 1999, with Ken Fasano's
help, this actually became the primary window of the JustMusic
software interface. A year after that, John Chalmers showed
me the JI Calc program Carter Scholz had written for the Mac,
which was quite similar to what Ken and I had put together.

Meantime, around February of 1998, I had joined the Tuning List
and gradually thruout 1998 became a little familiar with Wilson's
work. Around the same time I first saw Mandelbaum's thesis, describing
Fokker's lattices. So a little at a time at that point I was
becoming familiar with the lattice ideas of others besides Johnston.

But the original idea to use animated tonal harmonic diagrams
was entirely my own, back around '84 or possibly '83.

love / peace / harmony ...

-monz
http://www.monz.org
"All roads lead to n^0"

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