Talk:Families of scales

A temperament is not a scale

In the contemporary sense we tend to distinguish the tuning system and its scales. In addition, I'm not sure about presenting such level of details in the page as it's quite hard to maintain. FloraC (talk) 06:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

I didn't think about how hard the page would be to maintain, sorry. I have reverted the page to how it was on 14 April before any of my edits, so things are back to how they were now.

In terms of the difference between a scale and a temperament: what is the difference? Is it that a scale has a set number of notes, whereas a temperament is a means of generating a scale? E.g., "Meantone" is a temperament, but "Meantone[19]" is a scale?

Or is it just that temperaments have lots of notes and scales only have a few?

I think I prefer the former definition to the latter, because there are lots of scales in and that have 40, 50, 70 or even 80+ notes. So if anything with lots of notes is a temperament and not a scale, we have to recategorise all of those.

Also, what about just intonation scales with lots of notes? They're too big to be scales, but they can't be temperaments, because they're just, not tempered. So they don't belong anywhere?

So I think the first definition is correct, right? If it has a fixed set of notes, it's a scale, if it's a method for generating scales, it's a temperament. Is that right?

Or is there a different definition besides either of those two which we use instead?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I just want to make sure I understand the basics like the definition of "scale" and "temperament", to make sure that I edit the wiki accurately. BudjarnLambeth (talk) 08:38, 16 April 2023 (UTC)