[LAU] ot-ish: musical scales question

[Dave Phillips]

R. Mattes wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jul 2010 10:39:53 +0100, James Morris wrote
>   
>> Now I'm not very musical, and found my way to wikipedia, 
>> specifically this page:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_tone_scale
>>
>> Which says "In music, a whole tone scale is a scale in which each 
>> note is separated from its neighbours by the interval of a whole 
>> step. There are only two complementary whole tone scales, both six-
>> note or hexatonic scales:

This is correct. In the usual ET scale contruction we have three normal 
symmetrical scales (aka modes of limited transposition) :

Chromatic scale: 1/2 step equidistant
Whole-tone scale: 1 step
Diminished scale: 1 1/2 steps

See Persichetti on the utility on symmetrical scales and Messiaen on 
modes of limited transposition.

Btw, to the OP: You might save yourself some work simply by 
incorporating Scala support.

    http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/

Best,

dp