Well-Tempered Scales

Western music deploys at its base a pixellation effect of sorts on actual sound. That is to improve on the alternative - 'just tuning' as it is called - which imposes harsh limitations on instruments with fixed pitches like harpsichords and pianos. On these instruments anything but 3 circle-of-fifths adjacent keys would be so far out of tune that they were unusable. Music was written with that constraint in mind and it sounded quite phenomenal. But then, around Bach's time, a new concept was developed by which that unfortunate remainder that was left when dividing physical octaves into 12 would be evenly applied to all twelve notes in an octave as if to keep everything out of tune by just a bit instead of pushing the entire remainder off to the next key. And that worked. Not only did it work in that it wasn't offensive to the ear in general, but it opened up never heard dimensions of harmony and foreign soundscapes. It worked because it was backward compatible in the sense that many older instruments like the viols didn't have fixed pitches and could therefore adjust to the new "temperament" as it was called. 

Bach subsequently wrote a series of pieces for the "well-tempered piano" where for the first time in history one piece existed for each position in the circle of fifths. It wasn't so much the existence of these pieces that was so remarkable, however, but the fact that all of them could be performed on the same instrument — in sequence — if that instrument was tuned in the well-tempered style. It was like the invention of color TV. 

Now that all 12 tonalities could be used a lot of weight shifted into exploring all these new possibilities. Instruments were designed and redesigned and a lot of training material for musicians was published that focussed on fluency in all 12 keys. This is one of ScalePlay's core functionalities, to allow the creation of scale patterns like 1-3-5-4-5-4-5-4 with graphic tools and then vertically transpose these pattern to have them start on the second note of a scale or maybe the fourth for example. The grid on the left hand is the pattern and the grid on the right hand determines how far up or down a pattern is shifted. Those two components are then be wrapped in chord components and several chord components finally constitute a composition or song form. 

This may sound like a fairly simple thing to do all in all and maybe not remarkable in whatever outcome one might expect of it, but in addition to generating interesting play-along etudes for improvising musicians ScalePlay can also be used to help writing music. Entire songs even, because it is so easy to dial in a chord sequence just by starting a bass line and then applying different scale types. A performance aspect exists as well where entire sequences can be triggered by touch if so desired, to drive external synth modules. 

ScalePlay 1.5 now available. It includes quite a few updates and fixes. Nothing spectacular, but still necessary layout and general compatibility adjustments. ScalePlay also received a dark mode compatibility overhaul and there was some work on the engine itself.