Journal Index

Ideas about music and composition

I studied music composition in school and continue to write choral music. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about music, especially about the relationship between composer, performer, and listener, and how composers should be educated.

Subseries: relational aspects of music
Subseries: my creative process

Singing

I love singing, especially in groups. I think more people should sing more often!

My relationships with various albums

I wanted to post something like music reviews, but I’m not interested in critique. I decided to write posts about albums I love, focusing on what they mean to me.

Other posts about music listening

In addition to the above categories, I have a number of other posts about music I listen to, or about music listening in general.

Feelings

In some of these posts, I write about my feelings; in others, I write about my ideas about feelings, like nostalgia. Some of them are more general journal-like writing that I felt belonged here more than any other category.

Winter

I wrote the bulk of my posts on here during the 100-post writing challenge I did. The challenge went over the winter of 2022–2023. For better or worse, the winter is one of the things that most defines my home region. I ended up having a lot to say about it. (Some of it was even positive!)

Localism

Different ideas I’ve had about “blooming where you’re planted”. I know snow is an honorable mention, but it belongs in the winter category.

Subseries: building local culture
Subseries: agriculture

Communication*

I’m using the term a bit vaguely here, but I have enough posts that somehow fit the theme of communication. All the posts in the “communication advice” subseries are kind of different angles on the same thing.

Subseries: communication advice

* I don’t have an icon for this one yet, will add it eventually

Stories

In my head, I just kind of class all various narrative forms as “stories”, regardless of medium. So most of my thinking on stories applies across that whole category, including movies, TV shows, games, and traditional literature.

Computer stuff

You might be able to guess from my hand-made website and my presence on Ctrl-C, but I am something of a computer nerd. I like messing around with programming and other software tools. I don’t often accomplish much with it, but it’s just a hobby, mainly.

Gaming

I like to play video games. When I was a kid, I found them very captivating, and would get kind of obsessed with them. I play them less now, but I still think they’re a super interesting art form that is still in its early days.

Recipes

I sometimes like to try new things when I cook. If I come up with something good, I like to share it!

Just intonation

Just intonation is where you use whole ratios to tune music. I think it’s really cool, but I have a hard time explaining it. It’s all really well organized in my head, but when I talk about it it’s a big spaghetti mess.

I tried to write a series to organize my thoughts about it and maybe evangelize it to some others, but this series is mostly me just bouncing around the spaghetti mess. I do think I eventually present some useful definitions and background information, but I don’t know if I’ve really gotten to the core of things like I want to yet.

  1. Introduction
  2. The harmonic series
  3. Building intervals
  4. Just intonation redux
  5. 5-limit tuning
  6. I just learned about Ratioscore

Projects

I like to start projects, but I’m evidently not so interested in finishing them. For now, this section is basically a specific series of posts wherein I reflect on this fact & explore some abandoned projects. But in the future I might add some other thoughts about my projects in general.

Linguistics

When I was in my late high school, early college years, I was really into linguistics. I read everything I could about it on Wikipedia. I still have a lot of fun learning etymologies, phonologies, and genealogies of various languages.

Metaposts

I occasionally write about my own writing here. It’s an easy topic, especially when I’m in a pinch.

Things I’ve done or might do

An intentionally vague category about various activities I’m interested in, but have only written about once.

Things I’ve done
Things I might do

Miscellaneous

Finally, all the articles I really couldn’t find a category for.