A remarkable common feature All the musical scales known to me encompass an octave. Even scales which tones unusual to us Europeans – Arabic, Indian, Japanese and African ones – encompass precisely an octave, i.e. the deepest and highest tones have a distance of precisely an octave, whatever scale this may be. I find this extremely remarkable. This is as if all the world’s languages, which after all have very different words, used the same word for a certain concept, had always done so, and done so independently of each other. What is the reason for this? The theory of

Scales are mathematical patterns When you hear a melody, it is based on a musical scale. The scale consist of the small number of tones which are allowed and may occur in the melody. In a linear sequence, these tones constitute the musical scale. Most melodies that can be heard in our cultural area can be traced back to one single scale, the Ionian or major scale, which is made up of seven notes in very specific scale steps. Thousands of scales However, there are thousands of different scales. Presumably you are familiar with the minor as well as with