Talk:5- to 10-tone scales in 84edo

Why do we still create new pages of 5- to 8-tone scales

Isn't this number arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive? FloraC (talk) 07:18, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

On Xenharmonic Wiki:Things to do, it says "Scales of size 5 to 10 should be given extra attention on the wiki"

In the talk page for that same page, user:Inthar said:

"Let me explain my decision to single out MOS sizes from 5 to 10 and why I believe scales of these sizes should be given extra attention on the wiki. There's something called the trill threshold in human psychoacoustics which is about 23/20 (close to 1\5) according to the linked paper. It's where rapidly alternating between two notes stops sounding like a trill or a vibrato and starts sounding like two disconnected notes and is a natural boundary between "steps" and "leaps", or "seconds" and "thirds".

In a scale for writing melodies in, though not all steps has to sound like seconds (it's not true for meantone[5]), at least one step should. Since a 5-note scale has average step size close to the trill threshold, 5 is a good lower bound. Since a 10-note scale, on average, will have two steps on the trill threshold, 10 notes is the size where two consecutive notes in scale will start sounding like chromatic alterations of the same note. (These arguments will hold more for MOSes for other scale types because of the regularity of MOSes.) I think we should include 10-note scales anyway, since some like blackwood[10] are commonly used in the community.

MOSes of larger size such as meantone[12] would probably be used as gamuts to choose notes for melodic scales and choose notes for MODMOSes of smaller MOSes from. They could still have Scale Workshop links but given less focus on."

For some reason, I had it in the back of my mind that I remembered reading something that said humans tend to be able to hold 5 to 8 'categories of thing' in our heads at once, and after that they start to blur into two different flavours of the same 'category', and that is why the majority of the world's musical cultures use mostly scales with 5 to 8 notes.

I could swear I remember said article being linked on the Xen Wiki somewhere. But for the life of me I can't find it, so I think I must just be misremembering what Inthar said, and it must be 10 tones, not 8, that I should have used.

I'm happy to rename the pages to 5- to 10-tone instead of 5- to 8-. --BudjarnLambeth (talk) 09:03, 4 January 2024 (UTC)