Peterson Institute publications
RSS News Feed Search

Speeches and Papers

Drugs, Crime, Money, and Development

by Edwin M. Truman, Peterson Institute for International Economics

April 25, 2007

© Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007.

It is a pleasure to be with you today at this Financial and Private Sector Development Forum and to participate on this panel on Drugs, Crime, Money, and Development.

First, let me explain my point of departure in addressing these issues. I am an economist by training. I worked in the US central bank and treasury for about 30 years as an economist. I had some involvement in money-laundering issues, including a minor supporting role in shaping of national and international policy to confront the phenomenon and involvement in a few specific cases. After retiring from government, I coauthored with Peter Reuter a book on antimoney laundering that was published a few of years ago: Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering. Peter also is an economist, but he has spent much of his career studying and developing policy with respect to illegal markets. It is the fact that we are both economists that led us to focus in our study on institutions and incentives.

I have divided my remarks this afternoon into two parts. First, I will provide my perspective on the phenomenon of money laundering and its links to crime and on the global antimoney laundering regime. Second, I will offer some observations on the implications of my assessment for the development activities of the World Bank Group.

Money laundering is a crime in most countries primarily because many crimes produce financial gains that criminals have to preserve and disguise before they can be employed. Thus, an antimoney laundering regime is principally a tool to fight those crimes. One clear exception to this generalization is the financing of terrorism where the financial resources generally are not derived from crime but are intended to support criminal activity. (I will set this aspect aside; we have enough to cover.) A less clear exception involves the societal objective of preserving the integrity of the financial system. (I will come back briefly to this aspect because it relates to the activities of this institution.)

Estimates of the scale of international money laundering start at the hundreds of billions of dollars and extend to more than a trillion dollars per year, or upwards of 2 percent of global GDP. The estimates are extremely imprecise, but they do establish that the money-laundering phenomenon is large. However, they are not useful in analyses of progress in fighting money laundering or the underlying crimes because of their imprecision. Moreover, society does not judge the seriousness of the underlying crimes on the basis of the amounts of money they generate to launder.

Money laundering is facilitated by the existence of national and other jurisdictional borders. Money crosses national borders much more easily than information about its possible origins. Not all money laundering involves an international dimension, but the existence of national borders facilitates the process. Consequently, the fight against money laundering is a quintessential international public good, requiring international cooperation to control it effectively. It has been characterized as the dark side of international financial globalization. As my former boss at the US Treasury, Larry Summers, said, “To secure the benefits of the globalized financial system, we need to ensure that its credibility and integrity are not undermined by money laundering, harmful tax competition, and poor regulatory standards.” However, money laundering is an issue not only at the global level but also at the village level, which is one of the many challenges.

Antimoney laundering (AML) strategies initially were developed primarily to help fight the sale and distribution of illegal drugs. The implicit model was based on a drug dealer who accumulated a lot of cash. He took that cash to a money launderer (a bank), who kept his money or transferred it elsewhere, including across national borders, so that it could be retransferred many times and the origins of the money could not be traced. The AML strategy involved forbidding the bank from offering its services to the drug dealer. This was expected to drive up the cost of his activity and the price of his product, and to diminish the demand for drugs and profits from drug dealing.

The problems with this model are several. First, criminals have multiple channels to launder money; close down the banks and criminals will use gold dealers or arrange for couriers to carry suitcases of cash across the border.

Second, drug dealing is only one of many underlying crimes that generate proceeds that have to be laundered, and most of the other examples do not involve large amounts of cash. In some cases, in areas such as fraud and embezzlement, the money is already inside the financial system when the crime is committed. Moreover, one is hard pressed to identify stand-alone money-laundering operations. They are either ad hoc arrangements or built into the execution of the crime.

Third, the risk of successful prosecution is low. The United States probably has the highest conviction rate for money laundering of any country in the world. Nevertheless, Peter Reuter and I estimated conservatively the probability of conviction for money laundering at about 6.5 percent. Even if the risk of conviction were as high as 10 percent, against a gross income of $500,000 to $1 million, the returns to the money launderer are large relative to the risks involved. The low risk of conviction and confiscation implies that the effects on the cost of money laundering or the underlying crime are commensurately small. They are even smaller elsewhere in the world where the risk of conviction is much lower.

Notwithstanding these shaky analytical foundations, we have built an elaborate global antimoney laundering regime to help to combat crime. The regime is based on the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) “Forty Recommendations on Money Laundering and Nine Special Recommendations on Terrorist Financing.” The regime is oriented primarily toward preventing financial institutions and nonfinancial institutions from becoming involved with money laundering, an approach derived from the simple model of the drug dealer who needs to launder his cash. Moreover, the prevention pillar of the antimoney laundering structure is only loosely connected with what we call the enforcement pillar of the regime that is addressed at prosecutions and punishments for the crime of money laundering or for the underlying crimes. (As I just noted, conviction rates even in the United States are low.) Why? Governments and their law enforcement agencies face budget constraints. Thus, zero tolerance is not a realistic standard.

The global antimoney laundering regime has been erected to address a serious phenomenon: crime and its facilitation. However, in my view, the structure we have built, and as a former official I do not exempt myself from this criticism, has several drawbacks. The lack of linkage between the prevention and enforcement pillars of the regime undermines its credibility. Moreover, the regime is costly, and a large portion of those costs, in particular for the prevention pillar, are not borne collectively by the public sector but by private sector institutions and their customers. We do not have a good handle on those public and private costs, which is another one of the challenges. ( Peter Reuter and I constructed a crude estimate for the United States of $7 billion dollars a year (as of 2003) or $25 dollar per capita. That amount is not much for the United States, but $25 per capita, even after making a purchasing-power-parity adjustment, would be significant for poor countries.) Finally, the AML regime, again in its prevention pillar in particular, creates distortions. We do not know the magnitudes of these distortions, but we can be reasonably confident about their (negative) signs.

As I indicated earlier, in addition to fighting crime, a secondary objective of the global AML regime is to protect the integrity of the core financial system—principally banks. (Indeed, the unit in the World Bank that is responsible for antimoney laundering is called the Financial Market Integrity Unit.) The rationale is that we do not want financial institutions, whose effectiveness—sometimes their viability—depends upon their good reputations, to be involved with crime and criminals. This modest objective is relatively easy to achieve with a sufficiently robust prevention pillar and occasional reinforcement from the enforcement pillar. The problem in the development context is that distortions are created in the process. For example, by discouraging the use of the core financial system, the AML regime promotes the development of nontraditional financial institutions and the informal economy. This, in turn, negatively affects the efficiency of resource allocation, tax revenues, and economic growth.

I do not want my views about the phenomenon of money laundering to be misunderstood. It is a serious, complicated, international challenge. However, we don’t really know what works to control money laundering. We do not have enough analysis of the incentives involved. We do not know the costs of the various elements of the global AML regime. Thus, it is difficult to assess whether we can and should do more to achieve added benefits. I am reasonably confident that the net benefit of what has been done in constructing the global regime over the past 20 years has been positive, but I am equally confident that we have made mistakes and could be more efficient and effective with the resources at hand.

This brings me to the second part of my remarks: implications of my assessment of the global AML regime for the development activities of the World Bank Group. My observations cover five topics: (1) strengthening the global antimoney laundering regime; (2) research on money laundering and best practices in combating the phenomenon; (3) the development of financial sectors; (4) assistance to low-income countries; and (5) dealing with corruption.

With respect to the global AML regime, the Bank, in cooperation with the Fund, the FATF, and FATF-style regional bodies, is already actively involved in the assessment of compliance with the standards of the current global regime. Criticisms have been raised about the consistency of those assessments across bodies and countries. No doubt improvements are being made. Legitimate issues also have been raised about the resource implications of these activities within the Bank and the Fund. It follows from the concerns that I have already expressed about our not knowing what works in combating money laundering that a broader consideration of some of these resource concerns is warranted, in part, as an element of the research activities of the Bank on which I will comment next.

However, my view is that the Bank and the Fund have an important role to play in these assessment activities. They are near universal institutions of global governance. Fighting money laundering and the financing of terrorism is an international “public good.” It follows that global institutions should play a role in upholding global standards of best practice.

The Bank also has a role in shaping the global regime and ensuring its consistency across countries, for example, with respect to the identification of the “predicate,” or underlying, crimes for which money laundering can be prosecuted on a cross-country basis. The FATF’s “Forty Recommendations” designate 20 categories of high-priority offenses that should be covered by national money-laundering statutes. However, in many countries not all of those offenses qualify when the crimes are committed in other jurisdictions. Seven do not qualify in the United States, including sexual exploitation, trafficking in human beings, and counterfeiting. The Bank can be an advocate in this area.

The Bank can also be an advocate for the inclusion of tax evasion in other countries as a cross-border money-laundering offense and for greater international cooperation in information exchange on tax evasion, which has a huge impact on the fiscal positions of developing countries.

Second, the Bank is well placed to conduct research about what works and does not work in combating money laundering. This type of research should be at the theoretical level like Elod Takats’ recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) working paper on potential misplaced incentives for financial institutions to over report potential suspicious activities. More research is also required at the empirical level, for example, on the costs of antimoney laundering regimes. Much of the Bank’s excellent and varied work on remittances was motivated by, and has implications for antimoney laundering, and that work should be continued.

The Bank could also take the lead in collecting international, case study information about money laundering or to help set standards for, and to coordinate the now limited national efforts to collect, this type of data. The emphasis should be on collecting information about methods, prices, and quantities, as well as on incentives and disincentives, to help devise more efficient strategies for dealing with the activity.

Finally, in connection with the important work that the Bank has done on corruption, Peter Reuter and I have suggested that it should collect detailed information on cases of kleptocracy—high-level official corruption—including names, amounts, convictions, and amounts returned to countries. Thus, the international community would have a scorecard to help measure its progress in this important area. We also pointed to the importance of full ratification of the UN Convention Against Corruption and more important its use in areas such as asset recovery. I am, therefore, gratified by the Bank’s recently announced Stolen Asset Recovery (StAR) Initiative and wish it well.

Third, the Bank’s work with members on the development of their financial sectors comes into play here. As I noted earlier, the integrity of core financial institutions is crucial to their effectiveness. The effectiveness of the financial system is, in turn, crucial to economic growth and the alleviation of poverty. However, the need to integrate appropriate regimes to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism into the development agenda is an area where it is important to resist an approach of one size fits all. We know that zero tolerance is not a realistic standard. The conventional prescription is to apply a risk-based approach, but this requires sophisticated differentiation by country and type of financial institution. A bank serving primarily rural clients should not be required to have as sophisticated an AML regime in place as one in the financial center of a country that has a large number of national and international clients. The last time I looked, this type of distinction was not being thoroughly implemented in analyses of AML regimes. Moreover, as noted earlier, in many countries, those regimes focus disproportionately on prevention, which is meaningless without stronger enforcement.

This brings me to my fourth topic, assistance to low-income member countries. From a global perspective, concerns about the interaction of drugs, crime, and money are luxury goods, receiving higher priority in advanced countries than in countries with much lower incomes per capita. Some may bemoan this situation, in particular because they understand correctly that a country without an AML regime that functions at least at a rudimentary level creates a potential, gaping loophole in the global regime.

One answer to this dilemma is to promote extensive technical assistance from institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. However, I suspect that this not enough because the technical assistance is primarily directed at the design of the prevention pillar of national money-laundering regimes not the operation of those prevention systems, much less the enforcement of laws against money laundering and, more importantly, the underlying criminal activities. Resources for training can help, but more is required. Thus, Peter Reuter and I argued for the wealthier countries to subsidize the operation of AML regimes in the poorest countries through global institutions like the Bank.

Finally, I come to the tortured issue of corruption and its links to money laundering. In most jurisdictions, many forms of corruption are criminal offenses, and their proceeds have to be laundered. However, that is only the beginning of the story. The amounts may be large or small. Corruption may involve many types of economic and noneconomic activities; many may be illegal, but some are “only” unethical. Moreover, though national laws are more uniform than they once were, legal standards still differ. In some countries, many forms of capital flight are illegal. In most countries, facilitating tax evasion is not illegal even though the economic costs generally are larger.

These complexities and differences complicate the work of the World Bank Group in dealing with corruption in general and as a source of demand for money laundering. They do not permit the Bank to ignore the phenomenon, and the Bank has not. The Bank has raised the international profile of the issues, including through its research activities. Some of this work is controversial because of its necessary reliance on surveys of perceptions rather than so-called objective measures like amounts changing hands. Efforts have been made to answer critics and deal with deficiencies, and I applaud those efforts. However, it is fair to say that Bank research and analysis of corruption issues have not yet swept the critics from the field. We cannot construct dollar-and-cents measures of corruption and use them to calibrate progress in this or any other dimension of money laundering. This means that measuring progress and effectiveness is challenging, but it does not mean that efforts should not be made. My sense is that the Bank’s overall research agenda should pay more attention to constructing measures of progress and to creating a database on cases of money laundering, corruption, and kleptocracy.

With respect to corruption as well as other criminal activities where the proceeds have to be laundered, the real challenge is to determine what works and why. We should be humble about the power and efficiency of our prescriptions. However, we can have confidence in a few principles such as de facto as well as de jure transparency and accountability in the fiscal affairs of government. I commend the Bank’s work in this area and its willingness to turn the light of transparency and accountability on its own lending activities.

It is important to resist becoming too discouraged about corruption and money laundering. Eighteen months ago, a former colleague at the US Treasury called me. He was depressed about a front-page story in The New YorkTimes about the alleged corruption and money laundering of a governor of a Nigerian state (Governor Alamieyeseigha of Bayelsa). He felt it signified a lack of progress. My contrarian interpretation was that the story was good news. At a minimum, it increased transparency. The man currently faces a 40-count indictment in Nigeria, so maybe the report signifies increased accountability as well.

My conclusion is that we have come a good distance over the past 20 years or so in combating money laundering. However, our understanding of the activity, and how best to control it as part of an effort to address the underlying criminal activity, is still rudimentary. The Bank Group can and should play a major role in the years ahead in further advancing our understanding of, and developing mechanisms to deal with, the interactions of drugs, crime, money, and development.

Book: Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering November 2004

Op-ed: Hungry for Human Rights September 28, 2005


Kasey Knudsen, saxophone

Dave Len Scott, trumpet

Doug Leibinger, trombone

Randy Vincent, guitar

Ken Cook, piano

Cliff Hugo, bass

George Marsh, drums

Will Johnson, prepared piano

Mission Statement

The SSU Faculty Jazz Ensemble gets together voluntarily for tuning listening skills and exploring ways to refine and inform our improvisations together, whether through free improvisation or straight ahead jazz--co-led by Doug and George. Everyone is encouraged to bring in compositions, works in progress, improvisation games, etc. The purpose of the gatherings is to explore improvisation from a viewpoint that includes free group composing all way through various jazz styles. The goal is to break down habits and open up new ways to listen and play together.

Why are we getting together?
We are getting together to further our group cohesion and trust.
To explore ways to open-up and enliven our improvisations—the free playing brings clarity, freshness, space, and deep listening, to the standard jazz repertoire.  The jazz repertoire brings history, knowledge, and attitude to our free playing.

What are we doing to address these needs?
We are exploring music games, music meditations, and various music schema to develop listening skills that are not tied to the jazz rules.
When playing jazz tunes and original compositions we are exploring ways to transcend within the traditional jazz format. The connections made in the games will inform the jazz playing.

What principles or beliefs guide our work?

Faculty Jazz Ensemble (from left)
Dave Len Scott, trumpet, Cliff Hugo, bass, George Marsh, drums, Doug Leibinger, trombone,
Kasey Knudsen, sax, Randy Vincent, guitar, Ken Cook, piano, Will Johnson, prepared piano


Drainage Modifications & Installations

The items below provide all documents and information needed to apply for permission to make drainage modifications along a Union Pacific right of way.

Not Sure Where to Start?

Select "Procedures" from the list below for a detailed outline of the application process from start to finish, including which forms you'll need, how to print copies of them and where to send them once they're completed.


Thursday, September 30, 2004

Scale of the Day: E Flat Ionian

E Flat Ionian scale as you would find it on any conventionally tuned instrument. It is often referred to as the E Flat Major scale as well. Which is misleading as Lydian and Mixolydian scales are also "major" scales having the root, third and fifth forming a major triad. Posted by Hello

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Scale of the Day: E Flat Lydian

An E Flat Lydian scale as you would find it on any conventionally tuned equal tempered instrument. Posted by Hello

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Why Harmony?

Okay. First post. Hello.

Stay tuned for Scale-of-the-day, musings about intonation and music in general. Below is an old essay that makes for a fair introduction of my thinking.

Harmony is expansive.

I first studied harmony as a young piano student. I had a facility for triadic harmony and could easily transpose, invert and otherwise pull major, minor, augmented and diminished triads off the keyboard at will. I was generally more interested in tinkering with chords than dutifully reading notes on the page so my piano studies soon stalled while my interest in music remained. (Why is early piano instruction so focused on sight-reading and otherwise divorced from listening or passion?)

Then I had the good fortune to take up jazz piano with Mary Fields. She would be the first great, and most enduring, learning influence in my life. She set me on a path of harmonic expansion that continues to spiral well beyond simple triadic harmony.

Expansive harmonic thinking began with stacking additional thirds on top of the now familiar triads to include the 7th, 9th, 11th and/or 13th degrees forming chords with more than just three notes. Some chords use every note in the scale. A full range of jazz harmonies soon followed. Suspended chords, chords with flat and/or raised 9ths (or alterations of any kind), poly-chords, tone clusters, chords respelled into new voicings, voicings that don’t include the root (leaving that role for the bass player to take up in combo settings), stacking and mixing intervals (not just thirds) and chord substitutions were just a few of the harmonic approaches I began exploring at this time. Mary Fields was also the first to introduce me to the quartertone music of Charles Ives and the “corporeal” music of Harry Partch. We even experimented with harmonies derived from phone numbers, names and other external stimuli. She instilled a sense of the importance of intervals. We studied and drilled modes until each one was second nature. She taught the value of curiosity and irreverence in the face of unthinking tradition. She gave me a copy of George Russell’s fantastic Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation. These ideas formed a catalyst for my expanding sense of harmony.

I later studied serial theory with Mario Pelusi. (“Serialism” is practically a dirty word in some quarters. This is not entirely undeserved. There is a particularly unattractive strain of elitism and intolerance associated with the serialist clique of university composers of the ‘50s and ‘60s and the whole “music of the future” language is a little tough to take seriously anymore. However, many of these unattractive qualities are also present in the ongoing backlash against non-tonal music. I think serialism needs to be reconsidered within a pluralistic environment. Doctor Pelusi is a positive example of teaching atonal theory without the hyperbole and intolerance that once fermented such backlash. It is possible to study and practice serialism without turning it into dogma.) Serial theory continued to expand my concept of harmony by exposing the assumptions one develops from a fluency in tonal syntax. Serialism is a natural approach to take when the continued approximation of tonal harmony within a 12-tone equal tempered system has worn thin. Serialism is aesthetically compatible with equal temperament. This is perhaps why 12-tone music written for the piano is so compelling (in my opinion).

What I learned from studying non-tonal composition is that all harmonic combinations are possible (the so-called “liberation of the dissonance” attributed to Arnold Schoenberg). But not all harmonic combinations are probable. Set theory is a valuable discipline for developing a deeper understanding of both the possible and the probable. Serialist aesthetic generally tends toward a systematic maximization of harmonic resources just outside conventional tonal language. I learned that there are more ways to organize and conceptualize harmony than just scales and chord changes. Ordered tone rows and the kinds of operations that can be carried out on them are both fascinating (in their ability to apply continuity to a sonic landscape bereft of familiar “tonal” landmarks) and frustrating (in that ordered sets have none of the live improvisational flexibility that scales have (even if it is relatively easy to improvise something that “sounds atonal”)). Understanding intervals remained the single common thread to understanding both scales and tone rows. Intervals paint the color of harmony and the body of intervals present in a given scale or tone row determines the precise shades and hues of the larger harmonic picture.

The next addition to harmonic understanding came over the course of studying composition with James Tenney. One thing he said in his very first composition class was, “Have you ever really listened to a major third on the piano? It sounds terrible.” That statement demonstrated a deep understanding of harmony. One understands harmony through listening to the quality of intervals. There is more than one way to tune a major third and the one found on a piano is not the only one worth considering.

Tenney’s theory of harmony uses lattice structures to map out harmonic space. These structures shatter the representational adequacy of the “circle of fifths” the same way jazz harmony detonates triadic language. Intervals take on a quantifiable quality. Harmonic conception became a descriptive geography open for wild exploration. Harmonic structures became widely applicable to melody, timbre, rhythm (durations are merely temporal intervals) and seemingly all other parameters (musical or otherwise). The shaky dichotomy of ‘consonance’ versus ‘dissonance’ unfolded into a wide spectrum of perceptual relatedness. By including a larger set of intonational variants (microtonal) one opens the harmonic landscape to a rich variety of ‘consonance’ and ‘dissonance’ that are often more ‘consonant’ and more ‘dissonant’ than the familiar chain of twelfth-root-of-two/100-cent-semitones affords. By stepping into the cracks “between the keys” I found a new understanding of tonal gravity that stimulated a new compositional direction for me.

Following my studies with Tenney I pursued a decidedly anti-scale aesthetic toward composition. The ideal approach seemed to be tuning each interval relative to what preceded it in a free harmony reminiscent of Lou Harrison’s “free style.” Tone rows seemed like a logical target for independently shaping specific intervals over time and composing a music that roams freely into the outer reaches of harmonic space without the opacity that equal temperament brings to serial music. I began speculating on the “liberation of the tonic (1/1)” and working toward a realization of vast, rootless harmonic landscapes. Then I took another look at George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Theory and decided to re-think the scale. I tried to systematically examine every possible scale and ended up altering my own concept of scale. Scales regained a high value for my harmonic sensibilities. I began to develop a more inclusive theory of harmony that builds upon the cross-fertilization of progressive jazz harmonic theories, microtonal theories and adaptive set theories.

Harmony seems to expand further outward the more I study it. There is something fundamental about frequency and periodicity that just seems to resonate with my personal sensibilities. There is something compositionally suggestive about scales, tone rows and intervals.

Harmony as color.

When the Pythagorean chain of just perfect fifths is bent into a circle, a measure of infinity is lost. The F-sharp and G-flat are coerced into sharing the same note on the piano keyboard as “otonal” and “utonal” qualities are blurred into a shade resembling the vibrancy of mud. Picasso’s “Blue Period” would have been much less compelling if he had only a single shade of “blue” to work with. The current equal tempered system affords twelve identical harmonic modulation points at the expense of such shading. Modes turn into mere scales as the sonic qualities of a “Lydian” or “Aeolian” are snapped into an opaque reordering of a singular sequence of five major and two minor seconds.

Modes are singularly important to understanding harmony. Yet current practice obscures a clear understanding of what modes are and why they paint the kinds of colors they do. A scale is said to be a “mode” of another scale if the sequential order of intervals varies only by starting point (a shifting of the tonic degree). In current practice the Lydian mode is said to be a mode of the “Major” scale (Ionian = Major) that starts from the fourth degree (resulting in the major seventh degree of the Ionian serving as the augmented fourth degree of the Lydian). The relative content of “otonal” versus “utonal” member pitch classes determines the overall “brightness” of harmonic color shading. These shades are dimmed when interval classes are folded into closed, flat-earth, cyclical approximations of more vibrant realities.

“Otonality” is sonically similar to “major tonality.” In traditional just intonation an otonal pitch has a frequency ratio with the largest prime factor in the numerator (i.e. the 3/2 just perfect fifth is otonal because the largest prime factor is three). In a lattice structure this would be any pitch whose coordinate point along its largest prime axis is a positive integer. In a Pythagorean system this would be any pitch that has a power of three in its numerator and a power of two (or whatever the scale replicating interval is if it is not the octave) in the denominator. This happens to be any pitch that is derived from tuning upward by just perfect fifths from the tonic. “Utonal” pitches are the inversion of “otonal” and sonically similar to “minor tonality.” As a coordinate point in a Pythagorean system the “utonal” pitch is negative (and derived from tuning upward by just perfect fourths from the tonic). A member pitch of any given scale will be otonal, utonal or a tonic in much the same manner integers are positive, negative or zero. The balance of otonal versus utonal pitches determines the modal identity of a scale.

A scale that is in Lydian mode is any scale that consists of a tonic and all otonal pitches (that is, zero utonal member pitches). A Lydian scale, however, refers to a common-practice relative of the Pythagorean Lydian that is typically made up of a tonic, major second, major third, augmented fourth, perfect fifth, major sixth and major seventh degree. It is possible to tune a Lydian scale to a non-Lydian mode, and as long as the tonic and augmented fourth degrees are left intact the other member pitches may be altered (i.e. minor or augmented seconds, augmented fifths, etc.) without changing its Lydian scale-ness. The key point is to differentiate between the Lydian scale and the Lydian mode.

The Ionian mode, therefore, is any the mode of any given scale that contains one utonal member. The Ionian mode is a single shade darker than the Lydian mode of that same scale. The following sequence then follows: Mixolydian mode = two utonal members, Dorian mode = three utonal members, Aeolian mode = four utonal members, Phrygian mode = five utonal members, Locrian mode = six utonal members, etc. Beyond six utonal members the ancient Greek names are abandoned in favor of the clarity of 7-utonal mode, 8-utonal mode, 9-utonal mode, etc. Given a seven note scale, one can regard the “brightness” spectrum as spanning from the Lydian mode as the “brightest” mode to the Locrian mode as the “darkest.”

When thinking of composition allegorically as painting the color implications of modes are compelling. Shifting between dark and light is an effective method for affecting contrast without falling into the clichéd “major = happy/minor = sad” dichotomy. (I generally find painting allegories like “color” and “brightness” to be more useful than the vague emotion/mood similes. While it is admittedly possible to calculate a specific emotional response range within a hypothetical listener, that task that lies well beyond the scope of harmonic theory.)

Harmony as an expression of the inner workings of tone.

Finding a universe of harmony within the overtone series of a single sounding tone is a bit like finding a preponderance of “solar systems” embedded within the atomic structure of matter. It makes for interesting speculation, but tends toward overly mystical interpretation. There is an undeniable suggestiveness to finding so much intervallic content at the “microscopic” level of acoustic phenomena. Vibrating objects almost seem to carry a sonic DNA that favors the 386-cent major third found between the fifth and fourth partial over the 400-cent approximation forced into place by frets and piano tuners. Unaccompanied choirs and violins certainly gravitate to “nature’s” version of the major third. Even more disconcerting is the 31-cent deviation between the 7/4 minor seventh and the 1000-cent 12TET version that is often sited as the acoustic origin of “blue” notes. Just intonation allows the overtone series’ of multiple notes to mesh more cleanly (and conversely “beat” against each other with more ferocity (wolf-tones)) than tempered systems allow. (This is a generalization, one must remember that unisons and octaves are every bit as clean in either system (because they are identical in just and equal temperaments) and that the human ear is willing to accept a 700-cent perfect fifth as “close enough” to stand in for the 702-cent just perfect fifth).

The overtone series as a compositional resource has inspired a number of interesting pieces. But as a larger, more encompassing harmonic system it tends to lack the darkness that inversion/utonality brings to harmonic language. The idea of constructing scales derived from the FFT analysis of complex timbres (or vice versa; constructing timbres derived from scales) is a fascinating compositional possibility. There is an undeniable aesthetic appeal to using a singular source to organize disparately related parameters. I would argue that a good FFT analysis will document harmonic content over time, exposing the “ordered” onset and fade of frequency energies, which has more in common with tone rows than the non-linear scale.

The larger conclusion to be drawn from studying the overtone series and the phenomenon of additive frequency sums forming complex tones is there is an abundance of harmonic content being effortlessly processed by our auditory systems all the time. The sonic world is rich with harmony. This is, by itself, a definitive answer to the question: why harmony? Studying and experimenting with harmony offers incredible and sometimes startling insights into the process of human auditory perception.

Harmony as an outward expression of natural phenomena.

When one numerically measures the size of intervals one can’t help but notice parallels to all the things quantifiable. One can take the interval of time required for the earth to orbit the sun (approximately one beat per 365.25 days) and transpose it up several octaves to conclude that the orbit is tuned to a G-natural. Like the overtone series, it is suggestive, but risks toppling into a miasma of mystical allusion (especially if one never asks the question “why transpose by octaves? Is the universe constructed of multiple powers of two?”).

The larger conclusion is that we can learn any number of things (and notice any number of coincidences) when we quantify any phenomena. I tend to regard music inspired by the overtone series as exploring internally derived logic and music structured by the orbits of celestial bodies (or the Earth’s magnetic field) as exploring externally derived logic. Life is rich. The grounding principle here is to recognize potential compositional resource (inspiration) without turning “meta-physical” or building a “grand unified theory of everything.” One does not knock the earth out of its orbit by playing in F-sharp minor.

Harmony bends well to structural machinations.

The real marvel of harmony is that our auditory system can process so much information so effortlessly and involuntarily. One doesn’t need to “understand” detailed harmonic theory to hear it. The octave sounds naturally consonant. Triadic qualities are communicated without needing proper names. Ordered tone rows reveal a consistency over time that an alert mind can process as structurally unifying. An open and curious mind is adaptable to harmonic ideas that are familiar or surprising.

Often when the question of “why harmony?” is posed the implied query is “why not just rely on intuition to determine what ‘sounds good?’” or the near-rhetorical and insidious question of “what is the point of over-thinking such things?” I am aesthetically opposed to the anti-intellectual attitude toward music (or any other endeavor) lurking behind these implied questions. All the calculating with numbers and experimenting with intonation is directed at achieving a sound that stimulates the auditory system irregardless of whether one is conscious of the machinations behind it. Wallowing in the familiar comforts of unthinking tradition leads to a mental atrophy that closes minds and dulls the senses.

There is also the pull of a harmonic traditions spanning across continents, cultures and centuries. Harry Partch drew inspiration from ancient Greece, the music of Chinese theatre and the rhythm of spoken word to develop a theory (and practice) of harmony that reflects the integrity of these influences. Partch contributed to an understanding of harmony that draws upon a sweeping view of music history coupled with acoustic principles. Charles Ives painted sonic portraits of the New England of his youth that creatively expanded the harmonic fabric of his own time. He speculated on a future when children would sing songs in quartertones as a natural evolution of harmonic development. Ivan Wyschnegradsky dreamt of angels visiting him and delivering “divine revelation” to write microtonal music for string quartet. The pulsating rhythms of Indonesian Gamelan music (with the unique pentatonic Slendro scale or 7-tone Pelog scale) have inspired both shallow imitation and fully formed performing ensembles worldwide. The story of Western “classical” music spanning from Gregorian chant to a developed tonal language and beyond to the total serialism of Pierre Boulez or aeleatoric practices of John Cage is itself a harmonic story of the gradual addition and acceptance of increasingly complicated intervallic relationships. Given a progressive view of harmonic evolution it is hard to resist the multiplicity of ideas available to forward-thinking composers of the early 21st century looking to build upon the examples of Partch, Ives, Wyschnegradsky and countless others.


According to Einstein's restricted theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum. Up until today, that had pretty much seemed to be the case, too. Early this morning, however, researchers from the Geneva-based OPERA project announced that the results from one of their recent experiments indicate that neutrinos can in fact outrun light particles.

Neutrinos are electrically-neutral subatomic particles, with almost no mass. The OPERA project has been studying the characteristics of a neutrino beam that is generated by the CERN accelerators in Geneva, Switzerland, and detected when it arrives 730 kilometers (454 miles) to the south at an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, Italy.

It takes photons (light particles) 2.4 milliseconds to make the trip. When neutrinos were tested, however, they reached Gran Sasso 60 nanoseconds sooner - this amounts to them traveling 20 parts per million faster than the speed of light.

The scientists are stymied by the results. "This outcome is totally unexpected," stated CERN spokesperson Antonio Ereditato. "Months of research and verifications have not been sufficient to identify an instrumental effect that could explain the result of our measurements."

If the observations are in fact accurate, the implications for the world of physics will be staggering. To that end, OPERA has submitted its data to the scientific community for evaluation, and is encouraging other groups to attempt to replicate its results.

A seminar on the findings will be webcast live today by CERN at 4:00pm CEST.