Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Levi McClain. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Levi, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

In early 2023 I found myself in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania eager to research and shoot an educational video project I was working on about Ringing Rocks Park. Ringing Rocks is centered around a very special boulder field in where many of the rocks hum musical tones like bells when you strike them with hammers. It’s a really uplifting thing to experience in person, as well as a very curious geologic phenomenon to wonder about. There hadn’t been an extensive amount of testing of the field at the time, so I set off with some recording and metering equipment and got to work. I collected a wide array of acoustic data, and enough samples to construct a virtual instrument from the sounds of the Ringing Rocks. I think the most meaningful thing to come out of that experience though, was a story. While pouring through writings and journals about the area from the local historical society I came across an account of a concert that was played at the Ringing Rocks in the late 1800’s. The story followed a local doctor, J. J. Ott who reportedly played a concert on a lithophone constructed from many of the rocks inside the field. Some even affectionately refer to the performance as “the worlds first ever rock concert”. He and his brass band played many songs that day, but all we had of it were written accounts. No photographs No recordings. Something about this didn’t sit right with me, and thats when the tenor of the project began to shift. The mission changed from “explain the acoustic science behind these cool rocks” to “Can we ever get back what Mr. Ott played that day? What does it mean to lose a piece of history forever?” I followed that lead instead and it took me on an incredible journey. I was able to help quantify in part humanities affects on the Ringing Rocks, record for the first time ever, a song that hadn’t been heard in 115 years, and help preserve a small, but important moment in history by telling J. J. Ott’s story.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Levi McClain. I’m a musician, and content creator who focuses on the study and communication of music theory. I believe there is a lot of value and beauty when we work across disciplines, so much of my focus rests on the crossroads between math, science, and music. What happens to a melody if we encode it onto a Möbius strip? How do the words we use to describe music affect how we hear it? What if we lived in an alternate universe where western music was constructed with a 31 note system instead of a 12 note system? How would that change the fundamentals of harmony and music as we know it? These are the kinds of questions I like to ask across Youtube, TikTok & Instagram. I originally started making videos in 2021. It began with a left field idea to make music that was controlled by algorithmically generated birds and geometric flock patterns. I went to Youtube to see if I could find a video on how I might go about programming this admittedly odd-ball idea. “I mean its the internet after all, that video has to exist somewhere” I thought to myself, but to my utter surprise, it didn’t. I guess Youtube’s birding, music, and coding community doesn’t have much overlap? go figure. Anyway, after seeing that no one had made this incredibly niche video, I decided I had to. The rest is pretty much history. Most of my channel today is all about asking and answering similarly niche musical questions, and trying to make interesting videos that don’t exist anywhere else.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A little over a decade ago I picked up my first instrument. It was a dinky little Epiphone Les Paul Special II guitar. Sunburst. The B string was always a little out of tune. You could measure the action with your pointer finger. For those not in the know, the Epiphone Les Paul Special II was basically the bargain brand version of a guitar that only your dad’s favorite classic rock god would be caught playing. Not the coolest thing for a kid obsessed with the likes of Foster the People and MGMT to be lugging around all day. Dad rock at its finest, at age 13. But you know what? I loved that guitar. It wasn’t just because it was my first instrument either. It was the conduit through which I dedicated my life to something that was meaningful. Learning a skill, as I’d find out over the next decade is hard. Being good at music isn’t just something you’re born with (if I may be allowed to disagree with what seems to be half of the population). Music is a skill, like math is a skill, like public speaking is a skill. All skills can be developed into some modicum of competency. Sure, there is some degree of natural aptitude that plays into the mix, but let me be the first to tell you, I did not have it! Levi? Close to 0 musical aptitude. I was always a slow learner when it came to artistic endeavors: I struggled to read music, or even hear the difference between two opposing notes. I couldn’t articulate my fingers to do what my mind was telling them to do (barre chords, am I right?), I just did not get it. The day I learned what a metronome was, was the day I found myself recording at a studio for the first time. After an hour of excruciating failure, and guitar squeaks one might confuse with the sound of a distressed cat, I bowed my head. Defeated. I found myself sat across a rather annoyed looking engineer who stared me down with a pair of cold, lifeless eyes. There was a long, awkward silence, followed by words that have been burned into my brain ever since, “you know kid, you should probably practice with a metronome”. I couldn’t understand why my peers would just seem to “get it” where I’d fall further and further behind. It seemed as if I practiced for hours more that people who were leagues ahead of me. Was I just incompetent? Maybe music just wasn’t for me. Or maybe, I just wasn’t practicing correctly. Despite being in a highly creative and artistic field, I’ve always felt more at home in STEM. Numbers don’t lie after all, right? There is a certain comfort in that. But I also grew up in a world which told me that the rigor of science and math belongs to science and math, not music. Music is a form of free expression, right? If we try and understand it through a technical framework doesn’t that kill the magic? That’s what I always thought. So paradoxically, I actively turned away from the very language that would give me the means to express myself through my instrument. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the depths of my misunderstanding. I made a choice. In the same way that knowing how to write doesn’t hurt your ability to tell a story, knowing music theory doesn’t hurt your ability to write a good song. On the contrary, it aids it. I made a 180 shift. There are people who have developed an impeccable sense of rhythm, all without ever touching a metronome. I was not going to be one of those people, so I went out and bought a metronome, and practiced with it religiously every single day. Although, it was no longer mindless practice, but rather practice with intention, and clear achievable goals. I took pages from sports medicine experts who suggested that “If you’re unable to do a movement slowly, than you will never be able to do it at speed”. So I slowed down my practice and focused on the micro-movements. I started to record myself all the time, so I could go back and listen with an unencumbered ear. It turns out, how I heard myself when I was playing, was very different than how I heard myself when I wasn’t. I started to do what I did best, think like an engineer! I approached my instrument with scrutiny, and a high degree of rigor, and what did I get for it? A loss of artistic merit? No. I gained the tools which allowed me to express myself how I always wanted to. I slowly got better. My rhythm got better, my understanding of my instrument got better, my MUSIC got better. Slow turned in to quick. I don’t have that dinky little Epiphone anymore. It was lost in a fire some years ago, and by that time, the bass had long since become my primary instrument anyway. I do not miss tuning that wonky B string, but I do miss that guitar. It taught me what I’ve since come to understand as the two most important lessons in music (and perhaps in life), 1: Your dedication has value. No matter who you are, you can always improve if you’re willing to put in the work. Whether it be art, or math, or music, you can improve your chosen skill every day, and become ever so slightly more competent than you were yesterday. 2: Don’t shy away from your unique understanding of the world. If you have a different way of looking at things, endeavor to recognize it as an asset and not something that should be buried, pushed aside, or not taken seriously.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

The goal behind my creative journey has always been to ask and (if I’m lucky) find the answer to interesting questions that either have no answer, or at the least, have an unsatisfying one. That is still the driving goal, but over this last year, the mission has grown to encompass a deep drive towards microtonal music education. One may think of microtonal music as “the notes in between the notes”. Earlier I mentioned a 12 note system. This is what we have in the west. We use a selection of these 12 notes to build out the framework which supports the music we listen to every day. Fortunately for us, there is no rule saying we have to stick to 12. I’ve been exploring music in a 31 system for some time on Tiktok and Youtube, and have found it to be incredibly useful, practical, and beautiful to work with. I want to convince as many people who participate in the the practice of western music as possible to try some of this microtonal music out. It’s cool stuff guys, I promise! The challenge is twofold: Since this is relatively new territory in music and one without a whole lot of precedent, a unified descriptive theory for 31 hasn’t been developed to the degree that it has with our familiar 12 note system. We’re working on that. The second problem is exposure. It’s one thing to say that this microtonal business sounds beautiful, it’s another thing to show it. Thats why I think its incredibly important for us to be out there showing and creating beautiful and emotionally impactful music that features these really cool ideas.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.levimcclain.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/levimcclainmusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LeviMcClain