Tonal Pitch Classes

• Oct 16, 2010 - 04:58

In the plugin developer handbook, I was looking at the table of "Tonal Pitch Classes in pitch order"
http://musescore.org/en/plugin-development/tonal-pitch-class-enum

I was wondering what the bold numbers in the left column meant (numbered from 11 down to 0).


Comments

I understand your puzzlement... It looked SO obvious when I originally draw that table, but coming back to it months after it seems less so.

Anyway, the numbers you refer to are the scale steps, where 0 stands for C (and its enharmonic equivalents, B# and Dbb), 1 for B##/C#/Db and so on. For each step there are 3 possible tpc's (except step 8, which has only two) and I thought useful to have a label under which to group them.

That second table is in itself only a convenience, as the order of the circle of the fifths described by the tonal pitch classes is not always the most useful order.

M.

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