Muddle: Difference between revisions

''Muddling'' refers to a process of mapping one [[periodic scale]] onto another one; the scale thus produced is a '''muddle'''. By periodic scale is meant a scale that repeats "at the something" (octave, tritave, something else). There are two necessary components: a ''parent scale'' and a ''target shape'', or simply "parent" and "target". The parent scale can be any periodic scale at all; the target scale is not exactly a scale – it is the outline or ''shape'' of a scale – and it must be defined in terms of units or degrees which comprise the steps. If the period is an octave, this means the target scale will be a subset of an [[edo]].

The simplest sort of muddle is a mos muddle, which is a sort of second-order [[mos scale]] and is useful for generating usable subsets of larger mos scales and for navigating [[regular temperament]]s. This article will mostly deal with mos muddles, but it should be remembered that this process can be generalized to arbitrary sequences of steps.