Tuesday, November 11, 2025

171edo tertiaseptal 31

Here's a new piece in 171edo. The scale here has 31 notes per octave, spaced rather evenly: 5 or 6 steps of 171edo between the notes of the scale. I learned about this scale from a discussion on reddit.

This scale supports traversal of the commas 2401:2400 and 65536:65625. Poking around on the web, I found an email where these commas are discussed and the name tertiaseptal is given to a class of scales that support traversing these commas.

Here is a chart showing tuning errors for 171edo. The numbers on the left and upper margins are the numerators and denominators of ratios for intervals in just intonation. The cells in the center show the tuning error of 171edo, in terms of steps of 171edo. So the maximum error possible is 0.5, where the just interval falls exactly between two steps of 171edo. This chart shows that ratios involving 11 are not approximated very well in 171edo! So for this piece I was prioritizing intervals that approximate ratios involving the primes 2, 3, 5, and 7.

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