no-herd
maintainer-wanted@gentoo.org
Scala is a powerful software tool for experimentation with musical tunings,
such as just intonation scales, equal and historical temperaments, microtonal
and macrotonal scales, and non-Western scales. It supports scale creation,
editing, comparison, analysis, storage, tuning of electronic instruments,
and MIDI file generation and tuning conversion. All this is integrated into
a single application with a wide variety of mathematical routines and scale
creation methods. Scala is ideal for the exploration of tunings and becoming
familiar with the concepts involved. In addition, a very large library of
scales is freely available for Scala and can be used for analysis or music
creation.
Great care has been taken to make Scala's functions and operations very
general. The range of parameter values that commands accept is made as wide
as possible. Often various forms of input are allowed. No arbitrary
restrictions are made. Scales are stored in a flexible format. Intervals can
be entered and saved as either ratios or in cents and be intermixed within
a single scale.
Constructing scales from scratch is one of Scala's strengths. The kinds of
scales that can be made with Scala include: equal temperaments, Pythagorean
(meantone) scales, Euler-Fokker genera, Fokker periodicity blocks, harmonic
scales, Partch diamonds and Wilson combination product sets. In addition,
a set of command files is included to build other kinds of scales such as
triadic scales, circular mirrorings, circulating temperaments, etc., and to
serve as examples.