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) pitches. A common scale in Eastern music is the pentatonic scale, which consists of five notes that span an octave. Some scales span part of an octave; Several such short scales are typically combined to form a scale spanning a full octave or more, and usually called with a third name of its own. The Middle Eastern music has around a dozen such basic short scales that are combined to form hundreds of full-octave spanning scales. Among these middle eastern scales Hejaz scale has one scale step spanning 14 intervals (of the middle eastern type found 53 in an octave)