Scala is “a powerful software tool for experimentation with Musical tunings”. The tool itself allows users to apply different tuning conventions to electronic instruments. With Scala, users can create, modify, and use complex musical scales.
Scala itself relies on plain text files with an extension of “scl”. The rules around the formatting of contents of the file itself are relatively permissive, namely:
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a file may only contain one scale.
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line comments are represented by lines beginning with “!”, they are ignored by Scala/compatible software
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the first line that is not a comment should contain a description of the fieldset
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The next non-comment line will contain the number of notes
- Each subsequent line will contain note values
- the note may be a cent value (e.g. 100.993), or
- the note may be a ratio (e.g. 1/4)
- scales may contain a combination of ratios and cent values
- logically, scales can contain two, or more notes
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any note value without a period will be considered a ratio for instance, 2 would be considered 2⁄1
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ratios contain one slash only
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numerators/denominators may be any positive number up to 231-1
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The first note of 1⁄1 or 0.0 cents is implicit and not in the files.
- ratios and cent values are calculated from the root note
Additionally, to make the output scales usable, I have applied some additional rules:
- the scale will cover a single octave
- the scale will contain at least two notes
- the notes in a scale will be ordered low to high
The below button will generate text in scala “.scl” format. To define a name and/or the number of notes in a scale use the text-boxes. If the boxes are not used, or if they contain invalid values (e.g. if the number of notes box contains letters, or is unusually low/high), random values will be used.
I’ve also used this code in a twitter bot that will irregularly tweet a scale: @microscalebot.