Step label spectrum
Musical scales come in many varieties, but as long as they're ascending and periodic they can be broken down into a finite list of steps stacked on top on each other.
Now that abstract scale display is coming to Scale Workshop we need a system for indicating the sizes of steps that is both human readable and machine executable.
Positive-size step indicators
Below is a list of adjectives related to size ordered simulteneously in ascending ASCII order and descending size order.
- Biggest
- Colossal
- Enormous
- Gigantic
- Huge
- Large
- Medium
- Normal
- Ordinary
- narrow
- minute
- negligible
- petite
- small
- tiny
- unnoticeable
- zilch
The bolded first letter is intended as a shorthand for step patterns like L, m and s in LLsLLLs for Ionian or LmLsLsLmLs for Blackdye Grave Dorian.
The zilch step is reserved for steps of zero size i.e. repeated notes in the scale.
The anonymous x step is used if there are only steps of one size.
Standard letters
For each naïve variety (count of step sizes, not to be confused with variety w.r.t. all interval classes) there is a standard set of letters to use. If possible the sets come in alphabetical order and with an equal number of uppercase and lowercase letters (or one more lowercase letter if the variety is odd).
| Naïve variety | Letters | Example | Name |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | x | xxxxx | 5edo |
| 2 | L, s | LsLsLsL | Sothic |
| 3 | L, m, s | LmLsLLsLm | Diasem Melodic Minor |
| 4 | L, M, n, s | nMLsLMnMLM | Zarlino[10] |
| 5 | L, M, n, s, t | tLsLtLnML | Zil[9] |
| 6 | H, L, M, n, s, t | ||
| 7 | H, L, M, n, s, t, u | ||
| 8 | B, H, L, M, n, s, t, u | ||
| 9 | B, H, L, M, n, p, s, t, u |