ID Systems for Musical Scales
by Luke Knotts
When making a website, having a numeric ID for each musical scale is useful. Ian Ring used binary representations of musical scales on their website. An example of the system is below.
Binary Scale IDs
The current tuning is 12edo. There are 4,096 scales (including transpositions, including the empty set), in this tuning.
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A binary system is cool because it can be calculated quickly by computers. It is also cool because it sorts all scales with lower notes before listing scales that use higher notes. It can be slightly awkward to work with however, because the order isn't always intuitive. The fact that scale No.16 is "[4]" while No.32 is "[5]" only makes sense if you recognize that 16 and 32 are the fourth and fifth powers of two.