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major scale · up and down

11 s · 90 bpm · C major, one octave

major scale · up and down 11 s · 90 bpm · C major, one octave
0:00 / 0:11
↓ wav ↓ midi

A C major scale climbing one octave and back down — the reference sound of "major"

↓ Download MP3 ↓ WAV (lossless)

The same numbers, a different scale

Under the hood this is just the degrees 1 through 8, in order:

# the matrix — pure position, no pitch yet
pitch: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Nothing in that line says C, or major, or even music. It’s a sequence of integers. Pitch only appears when the line is projected through a scale:

# the clip — the same matrix, given a context
source:
  kind: notes
  matrix: scale       # the 1..8 above
  scale: major        # ← the projection
  key: C
  octave: 4

Swap scale: major for minor, dorian, or lydian and the same 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 lands on different notes. The integers are pre-semantic; the scale is what gives them meaning.

That’s the core idea in Zigzag: a data structure carries no meaning on its own — meaning comes from the context you project it through. The same line can be read as pitch, as rhythm, as a chord voicing, or as positions in a form.