February 11, 2025 – Cat McGill – Neurodivergent musician and author

A visual representation

I’ve got a couple of things to show you which might help explain how I’m visualising the piece of music I’m creating. https://youtu.be/yVkdfJ9PkRQ?si=9Zqdy-07QzRhAlCL The video above shows a wave pendulum (sometimes called a harmonic pendulum) and if you watch you’ll see how the pendulums phase in and out of time with each other, eventually returning back to the point where they’re all swinging in unison. This is a much more complex pattern than mine because there are many more pendulums – if you think of one pendulum as one of my ticks then my version of this would just have three balls. This is a picture of a standing wave, taken from a physics website, and although it doesn’t represent exactly what my ticks do (if you’re going to be all science-y about it) it is nonetheless a good way of visualising what is happening, and pretty much how I think of it in my head. If you imagine that each of the wavy lines represents one of my ticks, you can see that there are points when all three come together perfectly – marked in purple as ‘nodes’ on the diagram. The red arrows point to ‘antinodes’ which are the parts where the three lines are most spread out and separated from each other. The straight dotted line that goes right through the middle is like the anchor for my harmony. (If you’re interested, it’s a G.) At the nodes when the lines come together you can see from

February 11, 2025 No Comments

My mum’s going to hate this

Well, obviously she’s not going to completely hate it (or if she does she’ll pretend she doesn’t) because she’s my mum, and even though I’m 44 she still does ‘proud mummy’ posts on Facebook. However, she does like a nice catchy tune and this is definitely not that. What we have in the video is: three tracks of clock ticking, each one at a slightly different speed; one melodic pattern that is at the same tempo as tick 1 (you may remember ‘Ominous thud’ from the last post), a different melodic pattern that is at the same tempo as tick 2, and yet another melodic pattern that is at the same tempo as tick 3. I wouldn’t recommend listening to all three at the same time. (There is also some other stuff but I’ll come to that in a minute.) Over the course of the loop, which is about a minute and a half long, the three ticks are more-or-less in time with each other at three points – beginning, middle, and end. In between those points where they’re together they very gradually and very irritatingly slide more and more out of time with each other, creating lots of rhythmic patterns that are shifting and changing and battling with each other until they slide back into place again when the ticks come back in time. I said in my last video that I was going to see if I could pick out some of the rhythms and make them into

February 11, 2025 No Comments