in the Chinese culture, the pentatonic scale is usually used for folk music and consists of C, D, E, G and A, commonly known as gong, shang, jue, chi and yu. Some scales span part of an octave; Several such short scales are typically combined to form a scale spanning a full octave or more, and usually called with a third name of its own. The Turkish and Middle Eastern music has around a dozen such basic short scales that are combined to form hundreds of full-octave spanning scales. Among these scales Hejaz scale has one scale step spanning 14 intervals (of the middle eastern type found 53 in an octave) roughly similar to 3 semitones (of the western type found 12 in an octave), while Saba scale, another of these middle eastern scales, has 3 consecutive scale steps within 14 commas, i.e. separated by roughly one western semitone either side of the middle tone. Gamelan music uses a small variety of scales including Pélog and Sléndro, none including equally tempered nor harmonic intervals. Indian classical music uses a moveable seven-note scale. Indian Rāgas often use intervals smaller than a semitone. Turkish music Turkish makams and Arabic music maqamat may use quarter tone intervals. In both rāgas and maqamat, the distance between a note and an inflection (e.g., śruti) of that same note may be less than a semitone. See also List of musical scales and modes Melodic pattern Pitch circularity Shepard tone References Further reading External links Octave Frequency Sweep, Consonance & Dissonance WolframTones—hear and play musical scales Visual representation of scales from WolframTones ScaleCoding Database in .xls and FileMaker formats of all 2048 possible unique scales in 12 tone equal temperament + meantone alternatives. Musical tuning Music theory