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) notes. A more mathematically flexible schema for binary representation, espoused by theorist Ian Ring in his study of musical scales, has bits representing ascending tones, with the smaller bits representing lower pitches and higher bits representing higher pitches. This causes the bits to appear reversed compared with Duncan's system. Under this schema, a major scale is 101010110101 = (2741), a single root tone is 1, and a chromatic scale is still 111111111111 (4095). All the tone possibilities that begin with a root tone, and are thus scale-like, are odd-numbered. Scales may also be shown as semitones from the tonic. For