I still have a few more posts to add to my “long gradients” series—moving on to the experiences of other patterns and places, since I think I’ve said all I have to say for now on how they might be represented photographically or otherwise. But having recently finished my orchestrated version of The Last Island (click below if you haven’t had a chance to watch/listen yet!), and toying with the idea of proposing it and “musical cartography” more generally as subjects of a talk for this fall’s NACIS conference, I’m taking a break from long gradients to write a few music-oriented posts. I’ll wait till the next post to focus on The Last Island—how I structured the piece based on spatial ideas about the geography it evokes as much as my relatively limited musical composition/theory training. The post you’re reading now will be more theoretical, thinking about a general framework of how musical, visual, and geographical space interact. While it might turn out not to have much bearing on the next post, it’s been necessary for me to work through that thinking.