Chromatic scale Chromatic scale The chromatic scale is a musical scale with twelve pitches, each a semitone above or below its adjacent pitches. As a result, in 12-tone equal temperament (the most common temperament in Western music), the chromatic scale covers all 12 of the available pitches. Thus, there is only one chromatic scale. Moreover, in equal temperament, all the semitones have the same size (100 cents). As a result, the notes of an equal-tempered chromatic scale are equally-spaced. This makes the chromatic scale a nondiatonic scale with no tonic because of the symmetry of its equally-spaced notes. The ascending and descending
Von Luschan's chromatic scale of the skin type of individuals introduced in 1975 by Harvard dermatologist Thomas B. Fitzpatrick to describe sun tanning behavior. The von Luschan scale was used extensively throughout the first half of the 20th century in race studies and anthropometry. However, the results were inconsistent: in many instances, different investigators would give different readings of the same person. The von Luschan scale was largely abandoned by the early 1950s, replaced with methods utilizing reflectance spectrophotometry. The following table shows the 36 categories of the von Luschan scale in relation to the six categories of the Fitzpatrick scale: Von Luschan's chromatic