Whole Tones Have No Home: Building a Weightless Scale
Short answer: In a whole-tone scale every note is the same distance from the next. No note stands out as home, so a tune in it never feels like it is going anywhere or arriving. That is what makes it sound like floating. My Space world was built on it for a while, until I found it too uneasy to work to and moved to the notes of one wide chord.
What I needed
I'm not a musician, so I came at this backwards. I had a world called Space that was supposed to feel weightless, and it kept sounding grounded. Notes pulled toward each other. Little phrases sounded like they were finishing. Nothing floats when it keeps landing.
So I went looking for a set of notes where nothing lands.
What a whole-tone scale is
Ordinary scales are uneven. Some neighbouring notes are a full step apart and some only half a step, and those half steps are what give a scale its sense of direction. One note leans into the next. One note feels like home.
A whole-tone scale removes the unevenness. Every step is a whole tone. The usual description is that no single tone stands out and the scale has a blurred, indistinct effect. Debussy and other composers of his time used it for that dreamlike quality.
I think of it as a round room with no door. You can walk in any direction and it looks the same.
What it did to Space
Two things changed at once when I switched Space to it. Phrases stopped sounding like they were ending. And the bell-like quality went, because a whole-tone scale contains no fifth, the interval I had used to build the bells and bowls of Forest. That second part is its own story: Why a Fifth Plus a Soft Onset Is Always a Singing Bowl.
The other worlds use scales that sing. Ocean and Forest both have notes that sit comfortably together and resolve. Space stopped singing. It hung there.
What it costs
A scale with no home can feel uneasy if you push it. I had to keep the notes that sound together far enough apart that they stay open and never clash, and keep everything soft. With hard, bright sounds the same scale would be unsettling.
Why Space moved on
A scale with no home is good at floating and bad at being lived with. After a few hours the floating turned into a faint unease, a feeling that something was about to happen and never did. That is fine for a film scene. It is wrong for something you leave on while you work.
So Space now uses only the notes of one wide, open chord. Any two sounds that meet belong to the same chord, so nothing clashes and nothing pulls anywhere either. It still doesn't land the way a tune lands, but it rests instead of hovering. The whole-tone version taught me what I was after: no arrival, and also no tension.
Sources
- Whole-tone scale, Wikipedia: the definition, the missing leading tone and its use by Debussy
Try it: Space is one of two worlds that open with a one-time payment. Ocean is free and starts in one click, so start there and hear the difference when you switch.
Open Ocean, free