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
Bohlen–Pierce scale Bohlen–Pierce scale The Bohlen–Pierce scale (BP scale) is a musical tuning and scale, first described in the 1970s, that offers an alternative to the octave-repeating scales typical in Western and other musics, specifically the equal tempered diatonic scale. The interval 3:1 (often called by a new name, tritave) serves as the fundamental harmonic ratio, replacing the diatonic scale's 2:1 (the octave). For any pitch that is part of the BP scale, all pitches one or more tritaves higher or lower are part of the system as well, and are considered equivalent. The BP scale divides the tritave into 13 steps,