Music & Engineering From Discovery to Publication How the SuperScales book was assembled from discovery, verification, production, and design — and what the next volumes in the series will cover. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Engineering The SuperScales book is the endpoint of a process that began not with a publishing plan but with a question: what[…]

Music & Engineering Building the MMA Drone System The engineering challenges of designing a drone system for a 7-note scale with 7 modes — how the SuperScales drone differs from the MetroDrone, and why mode-specific context changes the engineering requirements. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Engineering The MetroDrone, described in an earlier article, is a general-purpose tool:[…]

Music & Technology AI and Music Theory Discovery How AI assistance accelerated the analysis and production of the SuperScales book — what the collaboration between human musical expertise and AI capability actually looked like. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Technology The SuperScales book, like the Sound Cells series, was produced with AI assistance. This is worth being[…]

Music & Technology The 2,521 Trichord Pair Études How MMA’s 10 hexatonic subsets connect the SuperScales system to the Sound Cells trichord pair series — and how 2,521 études were generated from that connection. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Technology The SuperScales book includes 2,521 trichord pair études — exercises that use MMA’s hexatonic subsets as the[…]

Music & Technology Generating 864 MIDI Drones How the SuperScales companion drone system was built — one drone per mode per key, the acoustic engineering behind drone design, and why 864 is the right number. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Technology The SuperScales book includes 864 MIDI drone files — one for each combination of MMA mode,[…]

Music & Technology How SuperCollider Proved It The computational verification of MMA’s universality — the script that tested all 66 heptachords against all chord types, and what made the proof rigorous rather than intuitive. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Technology The claim that MMA is the only 7-note scale where all 12 transpositions function over real chords[…]

Music & Physics Timbre and Mode Choice How an instrument’s overtone profile shapes which MMA modes feel most natural on it — and why the same scale sounds different across different timbres and registers. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Mathematics The previous two articles established that MMA’s modes align with specific regions of the harmonic series —[…]

Music & Physics Acoustic Properties of the Altered Scale Why the most dissonant MMA mode — the Altered scale — is acoustically designed for dominant tension and resolution, and how tritone substitution works as a physics phenomenon. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Physics The Altered scale (Mode 7 of MMA, also called superlocrian or diminished whole-tone) is[…]

Music & Physics The Overtone Series and MMA Why the Melodic Minor Ascending scale aligns with the upper harmonic series more closely than the major scale — and what this means acoustically for dominant chord resonance. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Physics The harmonic series is the physical source of all musical intervals. When a string or[…]

Music & Mathematics MMA and the Circle of Fifths How the 12 MMA transpositions map onto the circle of fifths — revealing a symmetry in the distribution of modes that the chord-by-chord framework could not have predicted. Bruce ArnoldMusic & Mathematics The circle of fifths is the oldest and most fundamental organizational diagram in Western[…]