Steps & half steps

Inches and feet are to a carpenter what steps and half steps are to a musician.

Provided you are staying within the bounds of the equal temperament, which divides the octave in 12 equal parts (which is the basis for most of the music you hear every day), the distance between 2 different notes can always be boiled down to a number of halfsteps.

The half step is the smallest musical distance in the tonal system. (If you are interested in alternate tuning systems which use a different number of notes per octave, check this out)

In Music Maps, the half step will often be represented as a square.

The half step, or semitone, is the difference in sound between consecutive piano notes, or consecutive guitar frets.

When you move around using only half step intervals, you are using the chromatic scale. The chromatic scale uses all 12 tones equally, without exception. It gives you access to every note on the keyboard. The layout of the black keys creates 3 possible half step configurations.

Merging 2 half steps together creates a larger interval, the step.

On the keyboard, there are 4 possible configurations for steps. Becoming familiar with each of these is fundamental to scale building.

A sequence of steps creates what musicians call the whole tone scale.

As you can see, moving around in full steps, or whole tones, from a fixed starting point, only gives you access to half of the notes on the keyboard. That’s because there are 12 available notes, and since you’re cycling through them by leaps of 2 half steps, you never hit the odd numbers. Click one of the keyboard arrows to access the other whole tone scale. Notice that clicking more than once brings you back to the original set of available notes.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is famous for his use of the whole tone scale(s), most notably in Voiles (1909), which limits itself almost exclusively to these mysterious sets of sounds.