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
Harry Partch's 43-tone scale Harry Partch's 43-tone scale The 43-tone scale is a just intonation scale with 43 pitches in each octave, invented and used by Harry Partch. The first of Partch's "four concepts" is "The scale of musical intervals begins with absolute consonance (1 to 1) and gradually progresses into an infinitude of dissonance, the consonance of the intervals decreasing as the odd numbers of their ratios increase." Almost all of Partch's music is written in the 43-tone scale, and although most of his instruments can play only subsets of the full scale, he used it as an all-encompassing framework. Partch chose the