Human EDO size categorization
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The human EDO size categorization or HUECAT is a classification system devised by Budjarn Lambeth in 2024.
There is much ambiguity about whether certain EDOs are "big" or "small". Each composer and theorist has their own intuition about this. That makes it quite difficult for authors to try to talk about size as a property of EDOs.
HUECAT aims to alleviate that by not attempting to make any judgment about big or small, and instead categorizing EDOs based on how similar their number of notes is, to the number of humans present at some type of everyday place or event.
The categories HUECAT uses are:
- Picnic EDOs: 1 to 4
- Birthday EDOs: 5 to 19
- Carousel EDOs: 20 to 34
- Schoolbus EDOs: 35 to 54
- Double-decker EDOs: 55 to 74
- Wedding EDOs: 75 to 174
- Village EDOs: 175 to 999
- Town EDOs: 1,000 to 49,999
- City EDOs: 50,000 and up
HUECAT is not intended to be authoritative in any way, it is simply a tool for musicologists to have in their arsenal, if ever writing about EDO sizes proves difficult.
There is nothing about HUECAT that locks it down to octaves or equal tunings specifically, either, it could be used for any family of scales with an increasing number of notes: AFDOs, IFDOs, EDTs, EDFs, ED5s, etc.
So one could speak of "birthday AFDOs", "village EDTs", etc.