Three Dollar Quill

Okay, let's see if I can straighten things out in ten minutes or so, since I'd like to get to bed at least a little bit before I "have to".

I think one of the things I was wrong about wanting, was translating a pitch name in the context of a scale to a "generic" pitch name plus accidental. When I put it like that, it seems to make more sense to talk about a "sharp/flat three" than to figure out what the pitch name of "three" should be at any given moment. So, the consequence of that is that "a G-major scale" is made up of the specification for the root note, and the specification of the scale type. The scale "knows" the intervals between notes in it, and that knowledge plus the root of G lets it work out that "seven" is F-sharp.

I feel like this still needs to account for octave number in some way. Except, some scales won't have "octaves". And while some, like Bohlen-Pierce, have obvious replacements, it's not so obvious for others. To try to push things off on future me, we can suppose that a scale will have a "period ratio", and then what we care about is "periods above/below A4". Except that the period is supposed to tick over at C. Which makes varying amounts of sense. The way to push this off is to define a reference scale for each "family" of scales, and to define "A" and "C" in terms of the reference scale.

So, 12edo has "the C major scale", and alternative twelve-tone tunings have their own equivalents.

...

I got nerd-sniped trying to figure out how some pentatonic scales worked. I'll try to wrap up now, though.

Good night.