Saturday, July 19, 2025

Diatonic Scale in Just Intonation

I am continuing to explore conventional scales, like the 12 notes of a piano or the 7 white notes, tuned with just intonation.

This interval graph is a simple way to tune a piano - just a little bit out of the ordinary. Here is an algorithmic example using this tuning.

Just toying with possibilities, I came up with a tweaked version:

Here is an algorithmic example in this tuning. This network still has a diatonic scale as a connected subgraph, but this subgraph does not appear as any of the seven tuning modes I listed a few days ago. This got me wondering: how many ways are there to just tune a diatonic scale?

It was a pretty simple tweak to the code I wrote that counted 41844 ways to tune all twelve notes of the piano with just intonation. Looking just at the seven white notes, and requiring these seven notes to be all interconnected by simple just ratios - there are 16 ways to tune a diatonic scale! Here is a list.

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