Re: [LAU] ot-ish: musical scales question

From: James Morris <james@email-addr-hidden-art.net>
Date: Mon Jul 05 2010 - 12:46:17 EEST

On 5 July 2010 10:39, James Morris <james@jwm-art.net> wrote:
> 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?

Doh! I get it!

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

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