About Me

• Name: November/Locrian/Xander
• Pronouns: He/him or fae/faer
• Religion: Atheist pagan/skeptical witch
• Why am I so weird? I’m autistic. Low-support-needs, but still.

• Cats
• Math
• Science
• Writing
• Reading
• Vidya games
• Music theory
• Languages (mi sona e toki pona lili! I used to be passable at Japanese, but I’m rusty now.)
• Technology, in theory

In music, the locrian mode is the seventh mode of the major scale. You can think of it as either:

• Playing a major scale — all the white keys on a keyboard — but with B as the root instead of C, or
• Playing a minor scale, but with the second and fifth degrees lowered by a half-step.

Compared to the other diatonic modes, locrian is usually considered weird or useless. This is largely due to the flattened fifth, giving it a tritone where the other modes have a perfect fifth. It’s difficult to give a piece written in locrian a proper resolution; the listener’s ear will usually want it to go somewhere else.

I’ve found, though, that it’s perfectly possible to create melodies that sound nice in locrian as long as you approach the scale on its own terms. You have to treat it differently, and it’s more difficult to work with, but it’s as valid as any other musical construct we as a species have arbitrarily come up with (i.e. all of them).

In short, the locrian mode is something I like even if most other people don’t. Likewise, the content on this site is stuff that I’m interested in; if other people also enjoy it, then great! But it’s for me before anyone else, especially if it’s something so weird and niche that nobody else would care about it.