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A 9-limit cube scale

🔗Gene Ward Smith <gwsmith@svpal.org>

3/13/2004 1:41:04 PM

If you take the 27 tetrads of the chord cube of side 2 and extend them
to complete 9-limit o- or utonalities, you get a scale of 47 notes.
Once again we have one step of size 2401/2400, and so now tempering
this out gives us 46 notes, not 31 as before. If we look at commas of
less than 10 cents which lead to approximate consonances, we get
in order 2401/2400, 5120/5103, 225/224 and 1029/1024. Tempering out
both 2401/2400 and 5120/5103 leads to hemififths; like hemiwuerschmidt
this is a temperament 99 does a good job for, though 140 or 239 do
even better. Another interesting tuning is the minimax, which has pure
major thirds--the hemififths answer to 1/4 comma meantone. The 46
scale degrees in terms of hemififths range from -35 to 50 generator
steps, which spans most of 99.