4 – Musical Scales

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on musical scales. Of the perceptual dimensions used in music, pitch is unique in having a scale dividing it fairly rigidly into discrete steps. The-temporal continuum is divided into discrete beats, but the duration of the beat changes with tempo. Timbre is multidimensional, and all its dimensions admit of more or less continuous variation. Pitch alone is organized into discrete steps. This is true in almost all the cultures of the world. Beyond providing a measure of melodic motion, the scale provides a cognitive framework that facilitates the remembering of the pitches of a melody. This is especially important in non-literate cultures where the human memory is the only vehicle by which melodies are preserved. Without culturally established scales, the reproduction of tunes and their transmission from generation to generation is a haphazard affair. The pitch categories of a musical scale serve the same kind of psychological function as do discrete categories used in the recoding of many types of messages communicated across noisy channels.