Favorite musical scale, by number of pitch classes?
Displaying poll results.6669 total votes.
"Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television." -- Cal Keegan
"Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television." -- Cal Keegan
First Post (Score:2)
I'm tone deaf you insensitive clod.
Re: First Post (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
I'm insensitive, you deaf clod!
Re: First Post (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm tone deaf you insensitive clod.
So, are you a rapper, Dubstepper or Techno-er?
Re: (Score:2)
As a classically trained musician, I have found that electronic music across all sub-genres includes some of the most complex and intricate use of tonality I've ever heard. I can't speak for rap, personally, but isn't it silly to write off entire genres because of the limited scope you've been exposed to?
Re: (Score:1)
isn't it silly to write off entire genres because of the limited scope you've been exposed to?
No
Thai music is heptatonic (Score:5, Interesting)
Once when I was a kid, my mother gave me some Thai classical music to try to convert to a Western score. I had no idea...
Re: Thai music is heptatonic (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
Re: (Score:2)
Because it is not a scale but a method of teaching music/notes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
ha, yeah, I suppose I /still/ have no idea :P
What I meant is while western music scales mathematically divide the octave into 8 intervals (12 including the black keys), Thai instruments divide their "octave" into 7, which is part of the reason why Thai and other asian music sounds... exotic to westerners.
Here's someone who knows what he's talking about...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks... [google.com]
Also a herpetonic scale sounds cool because imagine a bunch of shiny lizards playing in an orchestra
Re: (Score:2)
What I meant is while western music scales mathematically divide the octave into 8 intervals (12 including the black keys), Thai instruments divide their "octave" into 7,
Look again at a piano keyboard. Notice there are 7 white keys and 5 black keys for each octave? There are seven letters in the western scale, so people get confused by that.
But it's even more confusing, as the western scale divides the octave into 12 notes, and then does LSD while smoking crack before inventing the notation for those 12 notes and related "keys". If we ditched the oddball half-step from E to F, we'd have 6 letters with sharps and flats giving 12 notes/octave, and it would all make much mo
Re: (Score:2)
Experienced choral singers know that an F sharp is actually different from G flat, but that’s another thing altogether.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The names of the notes are do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si and (upper)do. Stop with your irrelevant, middle school for muricans, notation
Where I'm from (which is not America), the ABC note names are the standard, from beginners to professional musicians. What makes you say the other note names are the definitive ones?
Re: (Score:2)
nonsense, those names are a recent invention
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Hey now... I blame drugs, alcohol, and youth but I actually majored in music theory at one point and the minor pentatonic (or sometimes called the pentatonic minor) is my favorite scale as it is both useful for jazz and blues and, well, you can transpose it with ease and at least "fit in" with most any type of music western music. It is like the adjustable wrench of music, not the perfect tool but will do in a pinch if you need it. Then again I am fatalistic and pragmatic all at the same time. Utilitarian i
Re: Thai music is heptatonic (Score:2)
The octave is included in the scale, hence octatonic.
Re: Thai music is heptatonic (Score:2)
I'll remember that next time I'm doing a misic search.
Re: (Score:2)
Pentatonic is a favorite among guitarists because the finger positions are easy. It's very common in blues, rock, metal and their many sub-genres. Rock often times drops the 3rd in a chord and only plays the 5th and an octave {aka power chord} The third of a chord is sometimes referred to as the color tone because it determiners if the chord is major or minor. The power chord is also a favorite in these genres because of it easy finger positions and because it fits within the pentatonic scale.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, surprised to see its lack of popularity, here.
Lots of Off-By-One Errors around! (Score:2)
Are you counting the notes, or the intervals? Are you counting the root once or twice (1 and 8)? Got fencepost errors?
I end up dealing with this a bit more, because I play mountain dulcimer, and dulcimer tab notation starts at 0 instead of 1, counting from the open strings to N frets in a mostly-diatonic scale. (Usually the tuning on the middle string means you end up with at least one more note available, plus most dulcimers these days add the 6.5 fret (which gets you the 7th note in the melody string's
Re: (Score:1)
I end up dealing with this a bit more, because I play mountain dulcimer, and dulcimer tab notation starts at 0 instead of 1,
This is what happens when you make an instrument from a fence-post.
All of the Above! (Score:3)
Music is almost as good as computers, not quite though.
Re: (Score:2)
Dodecaphonic (Score:2, Insightful)
I voted "Eight is *not* enough"
Twelve! [wikipedia.org]
Arnold Schoenberg [youtube.com]
Anton Webern [youtube.com]
Alban Berg [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Richard Astley [youtube.com]
In order to Rickroll someone, they have to not know they are going to get Rick Astley with a link.
Re: (Score:2)
Add to it Amazing Grace with Ernie Englund (Trumpet) and Ola Höglund (Cathedral Organ) [bedug.com].
You need to have speakers able to go very low in frequency to experience the really low notes.
Re: (Score:1)
I was about to make a joke about Triskaidecatonic Classes... but they are real: The Bohlen–Pierce Scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohlen–Pierce_scale
I then was going to do something about Bach having 13 children, including the infamous P.D.Q. Bach, the composer of "The Short Tempered Clavier", but I had forgotten Bach's first wife.
Bach Sr. sired a sum of _20_ children.
When did he ever find time to _compose_?
Re: (Score:2)
Vi Hart [youtube.com]
Dodecatonic! (Score:1)
Definitely dodecatonic. It's the only one that (at least on the piano) does not discriminate between black and white. All the others are racist!
Re: (Score:2)
no, the ratio is 9 to 13 on a standard 88 key piano.
Re: (Score:1)
That's what the final option was supposed to be for :) There are various ways scales can be defined, though, so this particular set is just one selection, not meant to be rigorous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
Notable missing option: (Score:5, Funny)
gintonic.
Re: (Score:2)
catatonic
Re: (Score:3)
Catatonic is a special subclass of Gintonic.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Quarter-tones FTW (Score:2)
The quarter-flat third and sixth, at a minimum, add so much to music. The quarter-flat second too!
Heptatonic (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Westerners break the octave up into 12 steps, each a 12th root away from the previous step. That should be a full stop, but no.... then they decide to pick subsets of that as special... not a single subset of course, but lots of subsets are labeled as special...
Its all a big pile of mistakes.. ancient mistakes...imagine if all programming languages were backward compatible derivatives of Fortran, Cobol, or Lisp.... thats the current
Re: (Score:2)
Actually if you are playing anything written before 1700s on a modern instrument it will not sound like the original because we now use a different tuning system. Imagine that if in order to change keys you would have to re-tune your instrument I can't imagine playing in the mean tuning used prior it would sound slightly out of tune.
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention the pitches have been going higher, standard A pitch a few centuries ago could be as low as about 370 Herz
Re: (Score:2)
The idea of musical notes being a straightforward geometric series took an awful long time to be realised, because of the idea (set in train by Pythagoras) that musical intervals HAD
Re: (Score:2)
The reason Pythagoras picked simple integer ratios because that's what naturally occurs in physics and math as harmonics. Using "a straightforward geometric series" doesn't give you that. Even somebody who has never heard music would perceive just temperament as intrinsically different from equal tem
Re: (Score:2)
A single piece may not, but taken as a whole body of work, dodecatonic scales are the norm in most music today. So rather than have to say "this 5-stave notation represents the key of E-flat in this particular case", a 6-stave representation would be key-agnostic. Not all note positions would be needed in a given piece, but all instruments co
Re: (Score:2)
But most Western instruments are very much not key-agnostic and don't use a 12 tone scale. Playing a major scale in C and C# is completely different on most instruments, and chromatic scales are quite tricky on many instruments. In addition, the music notation system was developed for just tuning, not equal temperament.
And, actually, the current system is "key agnostic" because you can change the clef and the key signature. It is instrumentalists who choose to
Re: (Score:2)
That's not just Westerners, and it's not arbitrary either: it reflects harmonics, resonances, interference, human physiology, human perception, and other physical properties of sound.
Re: (Score:2)
Or it could just be that most of music formalisms are batshit insane...
Westerners break the octave up into 12 steps, each a 12th root away from the previous step. That should be a full stop, but no.... then they decide to pick subsets of that as special... not a single subset of course, but lots of subsets are labeled as special...
Its all a big pile of mistakes.. ancient mistakes...imagine if all programming languages were backward compatible derivatives of Fortran, Cobol, or Lisp.... thats the current state of music formalism...
The major scale is derived from the harmonic series. Schoenberg has a very clear description of the derivation in section IV of his "Theory of Harmony." The equal-tempered chromatic scale is used to tune fixed-pitch keyboard instruments because it provides a reasonable approximation of diatonic pitches in all 12 keys. It was invented after the diatonic scales, which were themselves invented in relation to the harmonic series, which is a natural phenomenon. So the chromatic scale is not really the apotheosis
Re: (Score:2)
So the chromatic scale is not really the apotheosis of musical description; it's a convenient way to tune pianos.
Yes, yes, yes!
Re: (Score:3)
The pentatonic scale is usually the first scale taught to beginning guitarist because of it's easy fingering positions and is in almost every beginners guitar books for rock or blues. I imagine those voting pentatonic play guitar and can pound out at least few classic rock or blues tunes most of which are based heavily around a pentatonic scale.
Re: (Score:2)
Pentatonic is a favorite among guitarist because of it's easy finger positioning. It's also the most popular scale in blues, rock, and metal and usually the first scale a beginning guitarist learns.
Re: (Score:2)
I was considering Octatonic because of the bebop scale, but I went with heptatonic because I actually don't use the bebop scale that much in practice, and I like baroque keyboard music almost as much as I like bebop.
Re: (Score:1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
I'm also amazed that the hexatonic scale didn't rate more highly. Here's an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
But this one, an octatonic scale, did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org]
Essentially, the standard western major and minor scales as well as the blues scale, a minor pentatonic with that extra flat 5th/sharp 4th, rated rather poorly. What kind of music i
A lot of star wars themes (Score:1)
Octotonic (Score:1)
Fuckin' Rite of Spring, Petrushka... Enough said.
Monotonic ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Klingon rap?
Or is it the Bass Slammers Remix of Aktuh And Melota?
Pentatonic (Score:1)
Eight is not enough (Score:1)
Never heard of the Chromatic scale? Schoenberg, Berg and others did.
All these scales do not divide the tones evenly in the frequency spectrum. They have to leave some out. Interestingly enough nor does the twelve note system, which does an even distribution in a logarithmic scale (base 12). At first hearing twelve tone music goes nowhere and slightly grates on you. After a while you start seeing (hearing) the purpose, but it is an acquired taste (no easy listening here). For an interesting read: The rest is
Re: (Score:2)
Pentatonic (Score:2)
Wrong question. (Score:2)
31-ET, applied correctly, goes a long way to fix the problems 12-ET has rendering pre-20th century music correctly. When this is not a viable option (as with most keyboard instruments), that's what unequal well temperaments are for. Meantone can be very nice for Renaissance and some Baroque but gets to be pretty rancid for Bach and his contemporaries.
If you deny enharmonicity, meaning E-sharp isn't equivalent to F-natural or any other note, and F-sharp is a different pitch from G-flat, then there are essent
So few Blues People (Score:2)
The Blues Scale is pentatonic, with an added flat-5th (or sharpened 4th.) It's a hexatonic scale.
Then again, I don't know that far. (Score:2)
N/T
Missing option (Score:2)
The Power of the Pentatonic Scale (Score:2)
Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F... [youtube.com]
The minor pentatonic scale changed my life. (Score:3)
The notes in the minor pentatonic scale go so well with blues and most rock music that any idiot (such as me) can produce a musical-sounding improvisation. Just randomly picking out notes in the scale, or going up and down parts of the scale, sounds great on top of the I/IV/V-based progressions that make up so much of modern music. And let me tell you, when you're an at-best "advanced beginner" musician, and you solo for the very first time and something that sounds like music comes out, it feels as good as any sex ever did. My interest in the guitar had been flagging a bit, until a teacher taught me the minor pentatonic scale and gave me the opportunity to play some solos on top of his chords; since then, I've wanted to learn guitar, play guitar, etc. pretty much non-stop.
My favorite tonic... (Score:2)
gin and tonic.
mark "then go listen to the McGarrigle's Heartbeats Accelerating"
Explaining the joke (Score:2)