music Music is generally defined as the The arts, art of arranging sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Exact definition of music, definitions of mu ...

, a synthetic scale is a

scale Scale or scales may refer to: Mathematics * Scale (descriptive set theory), an object defined on a set of points * Scale (ratio), the ratio of a linear dimension of a model to the corresponding dimension of the original * Scale factor, a number ...

that derives from a traditional

diatonic Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are most often used to characterize scales, and are also applied to musical instruments, intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony. They are very often used as a p ...

major scale The major scale (or Ionian mode) is one of the most commonly used musical scales, especially in Western music. It is one of the diatonic scales. Like many musical scales, it is made up of seven notes: the eighth duplicates the first at doub ...

by altering of one

degree Degree may refer to: As a unit of measurement * Degree (angle), a unit of angle measurement ** Degree of geographical latitude ** Degree of geographical longitude * Degree symbol (°), a notation used in science, engineering, and mathemati ...

by a

semitone A semitone, also called a half step or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically. It is defined as the interval between two adjacent no ...

in either direction."Synthetic Musical Scales". Author(s): J. Murray Barbour. Source: ''The American Mathematical Monthly'', Vol. 36, No. 3, (Mar., 1929), pp. 155-160. Composer

Ferruccio Busoni Ferruccio Busoni (1 April 1866 – 27 July 1924) was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary ...

originally explored these scales in his ''A New Esthetic of Music''Busoni, Ferruccio (1907), translated Dr. Th. Baker (1911). ''Sketch Of A New Esthetic Of Music'', p.29-39. . and their number and variety were later clarified by J. Murray Barbour, who also proposed applying the procedure to scales of more or less than seven degrees, including

pentatonic scale A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven notes per octave (such as the major scale and minor scale). Pentatonic scales were developed independently by many ancien ...

s. These synthetic pitch collections may serve as basic melodic or harmonic material for a passage of music. However, the hundreds of available scales cause Murray Barbour to propose that, "The whole problem is of greater theoretical interest than of practical worth."

Alexander Scriabin Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (; russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин ; – ) was a Russian composer and virtuoso pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed ...

's mystic chord, when considered as a scale (the Prometheus scale), is an example of a synthetic chord—in that it is a whole tone scale with one degree altered. However, it was not the generating element to Scriabin's music, nor does his derivation of it from the whole tone scale necessarily indicate knowledge of Busoni's theories. Starting on C, the Prometheus scale is : The semitone steps for this scale are 2, 2, 2, 3, 1, 2. By adding a G to the scale, one would end up with the LydianVII, the fourth degree of the Melodic Minor scale. The pitches of synthetic scales may duplicate pre-existing scales, though their derivation is different and their use is often quite different.

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