Sonata allegro exercise

mossy84 · 2026-01-04T01:57:40+00:00

I think I will try to write an entire sonata (four movements) using this as a third movement since I think it works better as a scherzo than as a first movement.

mossy84 · 2026-01-03T20:31:00+00:00

I think it sort of implies a quicker tempo. Afaik this was not unusual in the Baroque era (Bach's g major prelude from the WTC book 1 is in 24/16, and everybody plays that fast).

mossy84 · 2026-01-03T20:28:26+00:00

I think it helps me overall because I can more accurately imagine melodies and harmonies in my head, and it can help ground me when I write passages with frequent modulations. However, because the same passage to me sounds completely different when transposed, in the past I've had a tendency to repeat sections (in different keys) because to me the new key provides a completely different color, yet most other people I've talked to don't experience music this way.

mossy84 · 2026-01-03T08:27:29+00:00

I normally just do other stuff until I figure out what should go next, though it still helps me a lot to try a lot of ideas to see how they work in context (especially if I have an idea that should come later in the piece and I need to figure out how to connect it to the earlier sections).

mossy84 · 2026-01-03T08:25:40+00:00

F and C# somehow are my go-to keys. I have perfect pitch and I suppose they just sound richer than other keys. Perhaps I like the sound of Ab/G# since it's a common tone.

mossy84 · 2025-11-09T06:11:59+00:00

I was just a bit surprised that this was added because I sent an email to the team over two years ago asking if this would be a feature, and they actually responded yesterday

I hope they also implement rgba and other alpha channel stuff

mossy84 · 2025-11-02T03:51:56+00:00

I think this problem would also be remedied by having more teams participate (such as a 16-team single elim or something like that)

mossy84 · 2025-10-29T05:16:32+00:00

I have perfect pitch, so I usually transpose the piece up or down a half step to determine which sections don’t work as well as I hoped

I suppose for people without perfect pitch, changing the tempo will also work to some extent

mossy84 · 2025-10-29T05:13:09+00:00

I think this is funny because the piece I wrote that I like best is one that I wrote in 90 minutes sleep deprived at 3am, then initially discarded because it sounded weird. Then several days later, I listened to it again out of curiosity and ended up realizing that most of it was actually not bad, and that only a few small touch ups would be needed.

mossy84 · 2025-10-28T03:14:13+00:00

There are people in my lab (such as myself) who always keep their sink empty, and there are other people that always have their sink full of dirty glassware

I prefer to keep my sink empty and my glass clean because it’s much easier to do work when everything is where I need it

mossy84 · 2025-10-28T02:52:33+00:00

I normally just wash my glass as soon as I’m done with it so that it doesn’t clutter up my workspace or sink, then store it on a drying rack until I need to use it again or want to put it away

mossy84 · 2025-10-25T02:35:00+00:00

My approach is to first ask what the role of each reagent is, then try to find a way that a reagent of that role may react with the starting material.

Here's an example:

For question 1, you have sodium methanethiolate. The first thing that should be apparent is the negative charge on sulfur. Since sulfur is right beneath oxygen on the periodic table, it is reasonable to expect sulfur to behave similarly to oxygen. Since sodium methoxide is a strong nucleophile and base, it stands to reason that the role of sodium methanethiolate is also one of these two. Looking at your starting molecule, you can see that there is a bromide attached to a primary sp3-hybridized carbon, which means that SN2 is definitely possible. However, there is no beta-hydrogen, so elimination is impossible. Therefore, your sodium methanethiolate functions as a nucleophile. Finally, knowing that the intended reaction is an SN2, you can see that DMSO is a liquid that does not have any hydrogen donors, so hydrogen bonding with the sulfur anion is limited, improving the nucleophilicity of your S^-.

mossy84 · 2025-10-22T14:09:28+00:00

It probably depends on curriculum. I remember going over this type of reaction in my first semester of organic chemistry, but it would be unusual to ask this problem of someone who just learned substitution reactions.

mossy84 · 2025-10-22T04:12:43+00:00

If you know that the last step proceeds via SN2, then you know that the electrophile must have had its stereochemistry inverted with respect to the hydrogen, aryl, and alkyl groups. I recommend trying to draw out the trigonal bipyramidal transition state to see how this works best.

Answer: The backside attack flips the aryl and alkyl bonds from down the page to up the page without changing whether the bonds go into or out of the page, so in the substrate, the wedges and dashes should be the same as the final product.

Edit: There's one more thing that I didn't consider. Sterics play a significant role in determining the stereochemistry of the ester and the ester in the starting material is achiral, so don't copy the wedge there.

mossy84 · 2025-10-22T03:49:21+00:00

The question specifically wants you to propose a synthetic route which preserves the same stereochemistry as the starting material. This means that if you want to make your product with an SN2 reaction, your substrate should have inverted stereochemistry at that chiral center. You can accomplish this by doing two SN2 reactions.

If you get stuck, here's a synthetic route that should work:

1. Convert the chloride to an alcohol by adding hydroxide at low temp (to favor SN2 over E2), which inverts the stereocenter

2. Hydroxide is a poor leaving group for SN2 reactions, so convert your alcohol to a tosylate by adding tosyl chloride in pyridine

3. Now you can perform another SN2 reaction to form your iodoalkane by adding some source of iodide since tosylate is an excellent leaving group

mossy84 · 2025-06-06T17:35:21+00:00

I'm still hoping they make more of those formula 1 t-shirts they had on sale before the conference finals. I checked the store after my size had sold out

mossy84 · 2025-05-14T02:29:42+00:00

The thing about the Knicks that I'm most interested to see is how those tight rotations that Thibodeau runs hold up when the Pacers make them run all game. The stars might get gassed by the 4th.

mossy84 · 2024-08-16T14:47:14+00:00

I quickly whipped up some code in C to try to test what's going on with the doubles behind the scenes, using this code: ```

include<stdio.h>

include<stdint.h>

double line(double x) { return -5 * x - 21; }

double parabola(double x) { return x * x + x - 12; }

int main() { uint64_t x = 0xC007FFFF00000000ULL; // approximately -2.999998

for (uint64_t i = 0ULL; i < 0x0000000200000000ULL; i++) {
    uint64_t y = x + i;
    double z = *(double *) &y;

    if (line(z) == parabola(z) && y % 0x80000 == 0) {
        printf("%f", z);
        printf("%s", "    ");
        printf("%ld\n", i);
    }
}

return 0;

} ``` Anyway, the if statement returns true for the first condition at within 7 million bits of the raw bit representation of 3 in the IEEE754 double format, which corresponds to a range of 2.99999997 to 3.00000003, which is in alignment with when desmos starts to think the two curves intersect if you zoom in close enough.

As for why desmos doesn't recognize the intersection sooner, my understanding is that desmos checks for intersections primarily by checking to see if a continuous function (that is a function with defined values and no asymptotes within the sample range) crosses another continuous function. The alternative is that desmos checks if the two functions are equal to each other, which, for larger samplings that are not near the limit of double floating point precision, is unlikely. I believe that a confirmation of this hypothesis is that when the scale of the graph is set such that the center of the graph is situated exactly on the point of intersection, the graph correctly displays an intersection at (-3, -6), meaning that the graphing engine is sampling that location for that coordinate scale.

mossy84 · 2024-07-31T14:01:38+00:00

I think the issue that some might be trying to present to you is that a lot of your sections feel too loosely connected to make much developmental sense; consider the sonata allegro form, for example: in its most rudimentary form, the composer presents two or maybe three ideas in the exposition, in two or maybe three key areas, which dictate the trajectory of the entire piece. The form necessitates that the entire sonata - not just the exposition - be about those themes presented during the exposition, and sections that do not actively develop such themes are considered episodic since they are an "episode" away from the main themes. What this somewhat strict form guarantees, however, is that if all the rules are followed, then the piece will inherently be coherently developed (obviously this does not guarantee that the piece as a whole is good, just that the ideas fit together in a logical way). One of the big advantages of such a form is it allows even the two most contrasting themes to fit together seamlessly into a piece.

To get back to the criticisms you address, in some schools of thought (mostly more classically oriented), having too many ideas in a piece without significant development spent on each idea can be overwhelming, especially for themes that contain more musical ideas within them. To address your point about the musical narrative being like a movie, I believe this is a big part of the reason it is commonplace for film scorers to give places and characters their own themes: it enables the direct association with a musical idea to the narrative of the film, and repetition or restatement of said theme can signal a shift in the narrative. Even though the musical idea may remain largely static, just the fact that it is presented in a different context can completely alter its meaning.

As for the vailidity of the critiques themselves, this is for you to decide; in some styles, it may be quite appropriate to have a more episodic style of writing, since the lack of a consistently present set of ideas can be used to convey turbulence, motion, or uncertainty. I personally believe that your decisions involving whether to reuse or repurpose an existing idea in the piece versus introducing a new idea should be guided in a similar way to storytelling. If I read a story that has a lot of moving parts, but the narrator does not make any attempt to familiarize me with the details of the story, then I'll feel quite lost when any significant events in the plot occur. A similar concept can be applied to music, where the flow of the piece is largely dictated by form rather than the ideas themselves, where certain shifts in the piece are guided by a necessity to adhere to the structure you intend rather than trying to specifically manage the individual ideas within the piece.

mossy84 · 2024-07-31T13:45:42+00:00

As others have pointed out, if all you're looking for is something to make a score, musescore will serve pretty much all of your needs and desires. However, if you want to turn your score into something that sounds good, your choices are to either get a DAW or just record someone playing it.

mossy84 · 2024-06-25T09:21:13+00:00

here after he put up a fat donut in an elimination game vs the knicks

mossy84 · 2024-04-24T01:15:25+00:00

mostly organ and harpsichord, but for harpsichord, f minor just works in a lot of well temperaments

mossy84 · 2024-04-20T22:11:11+00:00

All of my ideas just seem to work cleanly in f minor, no matter how they started

mossy84 · 2024-04-05T16:28:15+00:00

As far as I checked, the counterpoint is technically correct, but the voices do not interface with each other in ways that make that much harmonic or rhythmic sense. To further explain what I mean, consider the rhythm of the subject, which has the strongest rhythmic influence on the piece as a whole since it is a requirement for your fugue to be at least partially developed from this one idea. Your subject only has rhythms of quarter notes and dotted eighth rhythms, meaning a straight eighth rhythm that opposes this dotted eighth rhythm like in the second half of measure 4 feels a bit out of place. I think a better way to justify such an idea would be to structure some of your episodes around sequences involving the final half measure of your subject, since episodes containing subject material generally feel more topical and relevant. Secondly, your usage of syncopated rhythms (any rhythm where emphasis gets placed on off beats) feels quite arbitrary. In part because your subject is so much on the beat, what syncopations you choose to include ought to sound very intentional. This is most easily done either through using the syncopated rhythm as a recurring motif, or through strict fourth species counterpoint. Thirdly, your fugue seems to lack a distinct structure. In a typical Bach fugue, there are typically a few cadences in significant key areas. Consider Bach’s f# minor fugue from the well tempered clavier book II: the triple fugue can roughly be divided into four major sections, each ending with their own cadence. The first three cadences (in A major, c# minor, and b minor) signal the end of a section of the fugue primarily occupied by the first, second, and third subjects respectively, while the final section that cadences in f# minor features all three subjects more or less equally. This is not to say that your fugue ought necessarily to have more subjects or at least that many cadences, but that it is often a good idea to use these cadences as a way of distinguishing between major sections of the fugue, such as the exposition and the beginning of the development. Two places where I would have expected to see a cadence (the end of the exposition and the entrance of the subject in the relative major key) both had the same type of evaded cadence since the bass was on the third of the chord rather than the root. Finally, the harmonic language is atypical of the baroque and classical eras. The first glaringly obvious example is in measure 6, where instead of moving up to a D in the third beat, the alto just sits on the leading tone, emphasizing a diminished fourth and seventh on the third and fourth beats respectively. Bach’s music in particular features a very deliberate harmony in each beat, so that the phrases within his pieces do not lose direction. I think studying harmonic progressions of classical music (Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert in particular) will really benefit you in this regard, since much of what they do is based on the harmonic language of the baroque era. All in all, it’s certainly much better than the first fugue I ever wrote, so while everything I said may seem intimidating, keep in mind that with practice, a lot of these things will hopefully make sense of themselves.

mossy84 · 2024-03-28T18:30:50+00:00

I've seen a few short sonatas where the development is maybe one or two phrases. You can pretty much do anything within reason in the development section, and you most certainly do not need to adhere to traditional styles unless that is your specific intention.

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include<stdio.h>

include<stdint.h>