Scale Patterns

Modern music usually employs the twelve tone equal tempered scale, and as they say with some irony, there are only twelve notes...

Learning mechanical ways to divide and iterate over these twelve notes provides embellishments for movement during melodies, as well as helping to make sense of the underlying harmonic movements of songs.

It mostly comes down to defining a scale and then counting up and down.

In this interface you can select which notes will go into the scale on the first circle and on the second you decide what note the scale will start on. The starting note of the scale is called the root.

On the note circle the root is predetermined, what you are selecting is what notes go into the scale relative to the root.

A scale has as many modes as there are notes in that scale. Each mode starts on a different note of the scale, but uses the same set of notes overall.

The next interface adds a mode selection circle. This circle displays the notes of the current scale. Whichever you select becomes the root of the mode.

The simplest pattern you can make from a scale is to take a subset of that scale and play it in order. For instance, the chromatic scale contains all twelve notes. All other scales shown are a subset of that scale. The pentonic scales only have five notes, they are subsets of many other scales. Omitting groups of one or two notes from a scale will create many familiar patterns.

In the next interface the subset circle will control which notes of the scale are included in the output.

So far, we are only playing scale notes in order, within an octave.

You can actually use these notes up and down through as many octaves as you want, and you can play them in any order. You can progress through a scale in many ways, evoking different modes and subsets.

Here is a small language to describe this process. We will make a list of numbers that represent steps up and down the current set of notes. You start out on the first note of the set and for each number you move that many steps up or down the set of notes and add the note there to your output. If you go off either end, before the first note of the set or after the last, then you go into the octave below or above and reiterate the set of notes.

For example, the major scale in the first diagram would be described:
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1
or, indicating the same amount of steps taken multiple times:
0 1*7 -1*7

You can play a pattern over a scale, but embroider each note with other notes related to it, in or out of the scale. Let's add an embellishment to this pattern language.

An embellishment is a set of notes related to a single note by steps. There are three different types of steps in this interface, a subset step, a mode step, and a chromatic step.

Each note in the embellishment can use one or more step types to describe its relationship to the primary note. The primary note must be in the current subset of the scale. If the subset is the entire scale, then you can ignore the subset step.

To generate each note of the embellishment, you start back on the primary note, and then move the number of subset steps to a new note, and thne from that note you move the number of mode steps, and then finally the number of chromatic steps.

Omitted steps are taken to be zero and the number 0 by itself means the same note as the primary note. For example: s1m-1c-1 0 s1m-1c1 0 shows four notes. The first note is up one subset step, down a mode step and then down a chromatic step. The second note is the same as the primary note.

You write the letter representing the step type, followed by number of steps. If the note uses multiple step types, they must be in this order: subset(s), mode(m), chromatic(c)