Shí-èr-lǜ Shí-èr-lǜ Shí-èr-lǜ (, , "12 pitches") (twelve-pitch scale) was a standardized gamut of twelve notes. Also known, rather misleadingly, as the Chinese chromatic scale, it was one kind of chromatic scale used in ancient Chinese music. The Chinese scale uses the same intervals as the Pythagorean scale, based on 2:3 ratios (8:9, 16:27, 64:81, etc.). The gamut or its subsets were used for tuning and are preserved in bells and pipes. Unlike the Western chromatic scale, the shí-èr-lǜ was not used as a scale in its own right; it is rather a set of fundamental notes on which other scales
Scale (music) degree is played. Composers transform musical patterns by moving every note in the pattern by a constant number of scale steps: thus, in the C major scale, the pattern C–D–E might be shifted up, or transposed, a single scale step to become D–E–F. This process is called "scalar transposition" or "shifting to a new key" and can often be found in musical sequences and patterns. (It is D-E-F# in Chromatic transposition). Since the steps of a scale can have various sizes, this process introduces subtle melodic and harmonic variation into the music. In Western tonal music, the simplest and most