Andy Chase

It occurred to me today to write some Java classes to represent western musical scales; starting with the 12 tone system and then providing methods to build scales in a given major or minor key, (and eventually different modes,) and build chords.

Classes like this could also become the basis of any number of other utilities or applications; chord chart generators, midi generators et cetera.

Plus it would be good reinforcement for a person (such as myself) teaching themselves the fundamentals of music theory.

While conceptualizing how such a package might be broken down, one of the first things I wondered was, "When building a scale in a given key, is there a formula to determine whether the accidentals in that scale will be sharps or flats?" Sure, I could hard-code all of the scales by note as constants in some core utility class, but that would be a crutch, and inelegant.

Anyway, while Googling this very question one of the first things I came across was Steve White's weblog, specifically one of the entries about his Voices project. Steve appears to have had almost exactly the same idea a while ago, only he's doing it in C#. It will be interesting to read how he's approaching the problem.