Welcome to The Periodic Table of Harmony!
An interactive network diagram of all possible types of scales in 12-TET
By Justin Masayda
Click and drag to navigate the graph. Zoom with the mousewheel or touch pad zoom gesture.
Each of the 351 nodes on this graph represent a type of musical scale defined by a unique cycle of intervals. Each slice of a node shows the size of an interval in half steps (or semitones). Rotations of a node correspond with modes of the node's scale type. The chart is organized vertically by cardinality (the number of intervals in a scale type), and horizontally by the "balance" of intervals in that row; Nodes on the left have large disparities between interval sizes which equalize towards the right of the graph.
Links show parent/child relationships between nodes. Inserting a note into a scale type will divide one of its intervals into two smaller intervals. The resulting scale type will appear on the row above. Such scale types are referred to as parents, while scale types derived by merging two adjacent intervals are referred to as children.
Your feedback is appreciated! If you have any questions, comments, edit suggestions, bug reports, feature requests, etc., please post an issue here: https://github.com/keysmusician/Periodic-Table-of-Harmony/issues