Shi'er lü
Set of notes used in Chinese music / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Shi'er lü (Chinese: 十二律; pinyin: shí'èr lǜ; lit. '12 pitches'; Mandarin pronunciation: [ʂɻ̩˧˥ aɚ˥˧ ly˥˩]) is a standardized gamut of twelve notes used in ancient Chinese music.[1] It is also known, rather misleadingly, as the Chinese chromatic scale; it was only one kind of chromatic scale used in ancient Chinese music. The shi'er lü uses the same intervals as the Pythagorean scale, based on 3:2 ratios (8:9, 16:27, 64:81, etc.). The gamut or its subsets were used for tuning and are preserved in bells and pipes.[2]
Unlike the Western chromatic scale, the shi'er lü was not used as a scale in its own right; it is rather a set of fundamental notes on which other scales were constructed.[3]
The first reference to "standardization of bells and pitch" dates back to around 600 BCE, while the first description of the generation of pitches dates back to around 240 CE.[3]