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Prism plus

🔗Gene W Smith <genewardsmith@juno.com>

8/3/2002 12:30:31 PM

I finally hit a homer in the search for 12-note, 7-limit JI scales,
finding two scales closely related to "prism", but better. I searched
scales which contained two tetrachords a fifth apart
using (15/14)^3 (16/15)^4 (21/20)^3 (25/24)^2 = 2 as scale steps. I found

! pris.scl
! [16/15, 21/20, 25/24, 15/14, 16/15, 21/20, 15/14, 16/15, 25/24, 21/20,
16/15, 15/14]
optimized (15/14)^3 (16/15)^4 (21/20)^3 (25/24)^2 scale
12
!
16/15
28/25
7/6
5/4
4/3
7/5
3/2
8/5
5/3
7/4
28/15
2/1

Then I did another search, which looked for scales containing at least
one 7-limit tetradchord, and found another, graph-isomorphic scale (it
can be seen as the first scale, taken down a fourth, and transformed so
that two of the degrees are changed by 225/224.) "Prism" and similar
scales were looked at during this search, but these two have it beat.
Here is "prisa":

! prisa.scl
! [21/20, 16/15, 15/14, 25/24, 21/20, 16/15, 15/14, 16/15, 21/20, 25/24,
16/15, 15/14]
optimized (15/14)^3 (16/15)^4 (21/20)^3 (25/24)^2 scale
12
!
21/20
28/25
6/5
5/4
21/16
7/5
3/2
8/5
42/25
7/4
28/15
2/1

The statistics are

prism 30 intervals 24 triads 4 tetrads
pris 30 intervals 25 triads 5 tetrads
prisa 30 intervals 25 triads 5 tetrads

These three scales become the same when tempered by 225/224; in the
{225/224, 385/384} temperament, they have 49 11-limit intervals and 86
triads.