Pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic... what is a 12 tone scale called?
Pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic... what is a 12 tone scale called?
This seems like a dumb question. I know it's just called the chromatic scale, but isn't there a ______-tonic name?
I thought maybe dodeca-tonic. Dodecaphonic means something else, 12-tone composition.
I see some Google results for either dodecaphonic scale or duodecatonic scale. The latter points to a lot of Chinese mysticism pages.
Is there a generally accepted term?
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You seem a bit unclear with the Greek language.
Dodecaphonic comes from the Greek words ?????? (dodeca = twelve) and ????? (phonos = phone* as in phonetics, not as in telephone)
Dodecatonic comes from the Greek words ?????? (as above) and ????? (tonos = tone)
Dodecaphonic means something else, 12-tone composition.
Yes, but not necessarily. As you see above, I explained what it means exactly. When people refer to the 12-tone composition, they usually use words such as twelve-tone serialism, twelve-note composition, twelve-tone technique etc. You can take a look at Wikipedia to see some other names as well.
But the difference between the 12-tone serialism and the 12-note scale is that, the scale is an ascending (and then descending) collection of pitches, whereas serialism is not necessarily in an ascending (or descending) order.
So basically, if you want to call the 12 note equal tempered scale anything else besides chromatic, either of these words are linguistically correct. For most people though, the term chromatic scale would be the most commonly known.
But if you wanna go a different way, as in pentatonic, hexatonic etc, you can choose dodecatonic, so as to be consistent.
Not exactly thought in a scale per se, Nicolas Slonimsky in his book Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, calls the division of the octave in twelve equal parts a Semitone Progression.
*a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, as per the Wikipedia article.
The term "Dodecatonic" is most commonly used to describe a 12-tone scale. This naming is consistent with "dodecagon" (a 12-sided figure) as well as a "dodecahedron" (a 12-faced three dimensional shape).
Dodecatonic would seem to fit, but since we can already refer to it as the chromatic scale, there seems little point.
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