Counting sheep to get to sleep never worked so well for me, as the sheep tend to be all huddled in a herd and not very cooperative. Thus, I've found more inventive ways of "counting" myself to sleep such as counting in binary, deriving prime factorizations of integers, or contemplating some music theory. This piece was born of the latter.

As I laid there, I continued working out an alternate scale based on minor and major thirds. Just as the octatonic scale consists of major and minor seconds, so too can other scales be seen in this manner. At any rate, this piece is a bit of a sonification of the prior.

It's quite an amazing "scale" in that taking pitches at various intervals results in the circle of fifths, the octatonic scale, the whole tone scale, a diminished seventh, an augmented triad, and lastly a tritone relation. All of these scales and harmonies just so happen to be amongst my most favoritest of all semi-common scales and harmonies.

Sparing you the details of the derivation of the "scale" and its properties, suffice it to say I am quite enamored with its...amazingness. ^_^

It's not all theory. After all, I had to sonify it - a process which inevitably relies on the aesthetic preferences of the sonifier. Beyond that intrinsic bias, I have also, quite audibly included a most wonderfully awesome sound bite of Gordon Cooper commenting on his experiences as an astronaut for the Mercury spacecraft.

Essentially, there is no relation between the words and the music, aside from the vague connection of "orbit" and the naturally circular quality of the scale...along with the "new and strange" properties of this peculiar "scale." Certainly it's a departure from our usual earthly musical surroundings. !^_~!

With a meter of 3/4, I broke the primary convention of common time for many genres of electronic music. But as usual for me, genre is a consequence of creation and not vice versa.