Greetings! My name is Andrew Francis, my wikipedia name comes from my (defunct) university email address from Aberdeen University, where I graduated having studied Ecology.

Music Theory

My main area of contribution to Wikipedia is on the subject of music theory and I hope to do what I can to help clarify the daunting mass of overtly complicated, illogical and inconsistent terminology that exists in the field. It's hard enough to compose original music without the jungle of redundant wheel-reinvention and ambiguous and faddist nomenclature! I have been using spreadsheets to compare scales in the 12-tone equal temperament system. I have produced a table of scales showing how many notes different scales can share in common if their notes are moved to an optimal alignment whilst maintaining their respective relations to their tonic notes. This makes the task of learning new scales and of understanding their relationships to each other a much simpler matter than it would otherwise be. I now have a table of some 111 scales none of which are modes of each other (i.e. no scale can be formed from another in my list simply by changing the starting point of the sequence of notes it contains e.g. as you would make a natural minor (Aeolian) from a major (Ionian) scale). I have analysed all of these scales for their constituent triads (5 types if you include sus 4s) and codified this as data which can be used to compare scales directly in different alignments to map out which triads they have in common and which are different between scales in a given alignment. This is a tool for composition allowing a musician to pivot between different scales by stressing notes that are in common between two scales before introducing the changes that would add to the dissonance of a composition, making modulations into new scales as smooth as possible. I also have a simple and rapid means of identifying the occurrence of some 46 different chord types but am yet to simplify this by eliminating chords which are simply inversions of each other (a big job). Some of the scales I have used come from a source which documented equal tempered approximations of justly intoned scales but I make no apology for using the original names or documenting some of these scales even where there is a greater degree of discordance that was not necessarily present originally.

Difficulties in publishing

One day I hope to publish my work but this could be difficult because I have no formal musical qualifications and have found those academics who I have approached on the matter to be disinterested favouring their own 'specialisations' where their own expertise is much greater than mine. I would like my work peer reviewed and published in a mainstream musicological journal but unfortunately nothing like my work has been done and hence I am, in a sense, peerless and have so far been unable to join any kind of old boys network.

Further Directions and Invitations to collaborators

Should my work be published I shall introduce the term scale affinity to this site, I strongly believe that it has great use as a learning aid and as a unifying concept in musical theory. My ultimate ambition for the project would be to have a web-based analyser which allows users to input their own scales, check to see if they are derivable as modes of a previously entered scale and, if they are not, to analyse their chordal constitutions. I would be very happy to collaborate with more computer literate folks than myself, possibly to use my methods of analysis to transpose and play melodies or to help analyse existing compositions. Being a guitar player I have been particularly pleased with online fretboard mappers such as the one at website http://www.power-chord.com/gaff/mapper/ and would love to build such kinds of functionality into my system. Having observed some sophisticated fretboard mappers that determine what kinds of scales a guitarist is playing in on the basis of what notes are played it seems clear to me that some similar work to mine has been completed even if they are not as exhaustive and do not necessarily use tables of comparison.

Pet hates

Plastic! The world is suffocating in throw-away plastic! I believe that the government should make supermarkets accountable for it, consumer choice won’t do anything so long as the proletariat are disinterested, ignorant or just plain lazy.

I hate nightclubs, nobody can hear anybody else talk so only the pretty folk are interesting. It isn't that I'm just too old, I never did like them much. It's time the volume went down for the sake of the rest of us. In any case the music is generally crap.