[LAU] ot-ish: musical scales question

a program i'm making (yes that one) will benefit from knowing about
musical scales. i looked in the source code for non-sequencer (i'll
look at arpage next), and adapted an array there into the following
form:

    { "Major", { 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1 }},
    { "Natural Minor", { 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 }},
    { "Harmonic Minor", { 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 }},
    { "Melodic Minor", { 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1 }},
    { "Major Pentatonic", { 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 }},
    { "Minor Pentatonic", { 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0 }},
    { "Chromatic", { 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 }}

(1 means a note is part of that scale, 0 means it is not).

so for C Major:

    { "Major", { 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1 }},
                              c c# d d# e f f# g g# a a# b

(Unless I'm mistaken) all the above scales can be transposed to work
with any key.

Now I'm not very musical, and found my way to wikipedia, specifically this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_tone_scale

Which says "In music, a whole tone scale is a scale in which each note
is separated from its neighbours by the interval of a whole step.
There are only two complementary whole tone scales, both six-note or
hexatonic scales:
    * {C, D, E, F♯, G♯, A♯, C}
    * {B, D♭, E♭, F, G, A, B}.
"

Which is confusing for me because it seems I can represent it in the array as:

    { "Whole Tone", { 1, 0, 1, 0, 1 ,0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 }},

But goes on to say I it is impossible for any key other than "c" or
"b" but the array representation seems to show it could work for any
key.

Can anyone explain?

Cheers,
James.
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Received on Mon Jul 5 16:15:02 2010