Quote:
Originally posted by Undertoad
24 scale - is that 24 notes in the octave?
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Yeah. Just for those less familiar with music:
In the Western scale, an octave is divided into 12 semitones, each equally spaced on an exponential scale. In other words, the frequency of each note is a specific multiple of the frequency of the note below it, to be exact 2 to the 1/12th power. A note an octave up has twice the frequency of the note an octave below it.
Anyway, if you look at a piano, you might naively assume that all the white keys are equally spaced, and the black keys are just extra, but actually, an octave, 8 white keys, is divided equally into 12 parts, so the sharps and flats are actually filling in the spaces on a C major scale. Did that make any sense? Anyway, on a 24 note scale, you would have twice as many tones, each of the new ones half way between each note of the 12 note scale, so between C and C#, you would have another note, and between C# and D, and between D and D#, etc., etc.
And therefore, the majority of Western instruments, anything that has discrete notes, like pianos, guitars, trumpets, etc. would have no way to generate the extra notes, which is why I'm curious what a traditional chinese instrument that operates on the 24 note scale would be like.