In music a heptatonic scale is a scale (music) with seven (hepta) degrees. Examples include the diatonic scales include the major and minor scales and the musical modes. Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Music Look up Music in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Wikicities has a wiki about Music: Music Music City : a collaborative music database All Music Guide: includes a comprehensive and flexible Genre and Style system MusicWiki: A Collaborative Music-related encyclopedia Science... In music, a scale is an unordered collection of notes or pitches, as opposed to a series of intervals, which is a musical mode. ... In music or music theory a scale degree is an individual note of a scale, both its pitch and its diatonic function. ... In music theory, a diatonic scale is a scale whose notes are built on the natural staff positions of lines and spaces, with no accidentals, with or without a key signature. ... In music theory, the major scale is one of the diatonic scales. ... A minor scale in musical theory is a diatonic scale whose third scale degree is an interval of a minor third above the tonic. ... In music, a mode is an ordered series of musical intervals, which, along with the key or tonic, define the pitches. ...
On the basis of her study of Mandinka (the Mandinka are the western-most branch of the Mande family) balafons in The Gambia, (Mandinka Balafon, p.
To give the reader an idea of what this entails, it useful to compare equidistant heptatonic tuning to Western major or minor scales, which also have seven tones but, as we will see, the intervals or distances between the tones are different.
Jessup's "equidistant heptatonic" tuning is an ideal mathematical model that does not necessarily correspond to how actual balas are tuned.