Re: (OT) non-octave scales (was Re: various infotaining natlang tidbits)

On Thu, 15 Jun 2000 04:37:45 CDT, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

>I have heard of a 3:1 scale, but it's a modern invention.  The term for the
>inteval would be 'dodecade'.  I forgot how many tones the scale was divided
>in, but 19 tones (not the same thing as the 19-tone octave scale below)
>would produce a scale just off the 12-tone octave scale.
It's 13 tones, if you're thinking of the Bohlen-Pierce scale.
http://members.aol.com/bpsite/index.html

When I was working on a system of musical note names for Gjarrda (formerly
Jarrda), someone mentioned this scale. I wrote a short example of music
using it to put as an example on the Jarrda page.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/Gjarrda/music.html
http://sites.netscape.net/thryomanes/vortex.ra

>Nineteen-tone is supposed to be of Arabic origin (traditionally not equal
>temperament), and I use it myself.  I'd like to construct a keyboard based
>on a 19-tone scale.  In this scale, notes like C-sharp and D-flat are no
>longer enharmonic; instead a diatonic step is not cut in half, but thirds.
A nice feature of the 19-note scale is that the major and minor thirds
(especially the minor third) are closer to the pure just-intonation ratios
than the traditional 12-note scale. The perfect fifth is a little flat, but
not excessively so. The 22-note equal scale is better in some aspects, but
it has a very sharp minor third, and doesn't always handle traditional
chord progressions well.

An excellent resource for anyone interested in different tuning systems is
John Starrett's Microtonal Music Page
(http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~jstarret/microtone.html).

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