Composing in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale: the Twilight Zone of Tunings

8 min readOct 13, 2025

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Several people have asked me to explain how I compose in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale, or any tuning for that matter, but I mostly have no idea what I do.

Every time I start a new Bohlen-Pierce Scale piece, I think, “This can’t possibly be a song. It sounds terrible.” But after some hours or days it’ll suddenly sound less hopeless and maybe even like a viable song. Then I’ll spend quite a few more hours, which can turn into days and weeks, molding it like clay, or perhaps it’s like building up an impressionistic painting that in the end has some purpose. It’s not like I can just haul off and improvise in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale, other than maybe avant-garde atonal music (more on that later).

For me personally, composing in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale feels like trying to delicately steer a lucid dream without exploding it. It calls for patience and precision — a kind of deep focus that feels second nature to some of us on the spectrum. Autistic you are? Welcome to your home planet.

So far, none of this is helpful advice! You have asked for real advice, and you shall receive. I have thought of some very practical points that should definitely help with your Bohlen-Pierce Scale compositions, whether this is your first time, or you’ve been at it for decades.

What makes the Bohlen-Pierce Scale so unusual?

The Bohlen-Pierce Scale (BP) is not built on the octave (a 2:1 frequency ratio), but on the tritave — a 3:1 frequency ratio. And instead of the tuning consisting of twelve notes within this frame, BP consists of thirteen. In other words, instead of doubling in frequency every twelve notes like traditional Western tuning, BP triples in frequency every thirteen steps.

This means that BP has no octaves at all — only one of each note across the entire hearing range! It’s less surprising when you learn that the scale was not invented by a musician. It was independently invented by two microwave engineers of all things (Heinz Bohlen and John R. Pierce, seven years apart), each mathematically searching for the most self-consistent and “in-tune” set of frequency ratios possible. They simply didn’t realize how psychologically important octaves are to musicians.

But let’s be thankful for that — otherwise, we might never have stumbled onto this strangely beautiful tuning, which has been quietly spreading and inspiring more composers every year.

A bit of advice and motivation

Likely you’ll be composing by ear, just winging it, as I do. You might even have a weird advantage if you don’t know any music theory, but it does help to be familiar with general musical devices such as voice leading, tension and release, consonance and dissonance, etc.

If you try to force BP to sound “normal,” it’ll just come out clashy and awkward. But when you tune and voice things within its own logic — letting the harmonies sit where they naturally want to — the result sounds both pure and impossible, like consonance from another universe.

In fact, the more alien it sounds, the better you’re doing it. This is because people aren’t used to hearing intervals that sound in tune (minimal beating) yet are completely unfamiliar. In our standard Western tuning we only have a handful of consonant intervals and we’ve heard them a million times, whether we’re musicians or not. There is also the otherworldly emotion evoked by the unfamiliar musical distances as one BP note drifts to the next over time.

The musical geometry of BP

Think of BP as an alternative geometry of sound. Its “surface” is mostly smooth and periodically intersects with reality (every BP whole step sounds like a familiar “minor 3rd”). But one rule of equal tempered tunings is that making some intervals very harmonically pure inevitably leads to others being dissonant “cracks” in the geometry.

One example of this is that 19 notes per octave has cleaner “3rds and 6ths” than the standard twelve tone tuning does, but the mathematical tradeoff is harsher “4ths and 5ths.” They’re so bad that we mostly want to avoid playing them as intervals. BP has mostly very nice intervals, and then one big alarming crack — the “pseudo octave,” or “shrunken octave.”

Lastly, it’s unavoidable that I mention timbre– the actual “sounds” or “instruments” we use to compose. Pitched sounds will generally have a fundamental sine wave frequency which is the “note” or “pitch” that we hear, but will also contain multiple higher sine wave harmonics of various amplitudes which add up to shape of the waveform. Different shapes sound like different instruments.

Both Heinz Bohlen and John R. Pierce made it clear that BP is meant to be played with sounds that contain only odd harmonics (think clarinets, square waves, and triangle waves). Even harmonics won’t line up as purely so each interval will sound less clean. That said, I largely ignore this “rule” and use all sorts of crazy sounds. However, I do pay tribute to it often enough, especially when it does otherwise sound too dissonant.

The mechanical side of making BP behave

Here is some hands-on setup advice to keep BP from turning against you.

Keep All Instruments in the Same Register

Since there is only one of every note across the hearing range in BP (crazy!), we have to make sure all of our instruments are in the same octave range and not transposed up or down in pitch. So C3 should sound like C3 whether it’s a piccolo or a bass. If this isn’t the case, the Bohlen-Pierce Scale will doom you from the start, and you will defeat the entire purpose of the scale being so “in tune with itself.”

Firstly, I use MTS-ESP mini by OddSound. It’s a tiny VST plugin that you put on a track as if you’re adding an instrument. Open up the little plugin the same way you’d view a synth on a track, hit LOAD and select a Scala file for BP. Now, any of your instruments that are capable of responding to Scala/tuning files will automatically be tuned. Any synths that don’t respond to MTS-ESP can still be tuned separately.
For some VSTs, I have to go to the Master tuning section and LOCK the transpose field to zero (set the field to zero, then right-click and scroll until you see LOCK) so that when I scroll through sounds, they will not transpose up or down willy-nilly.
In a related sense, you can’t use sounds that have octaves layered as part of the sound. (There are other ways to make sounds thick and layered, such as using chorus, a slight detune with panning, or simply layering a few tracks with the same notes and different sounds, etc.) For this, you may also have to lock each oscillator so it doesn’t transpose up or down.

Compose Line by Line

Now that you have your sounds behaving, compose line by line as if you’re Bach, and then add other notes on top, very deliberately. You can’t be willy-nilly about inserting notes, or you’ll end up using the pseudo-octave in a chord (very easy to do by accident!) as well as other clashy notes, which may seem impossible to avoid until you get a handle on things.

Start by writing a nice melodic line, or maybe bass line first, whatever seems easier. Now add one layer above or below to make intervals that sound nice and pure. Repeat to get some three- or four-note layers going — chords! But think of this as the DNA of your song, more than a “chord progression.” Use everything you’ve ever learned about voice leading. Unless you’re trying to be super weird, I can’t stress that enough.
Duplicate this first track numerous times, change the sounds, and remove notes from each track to give each instrument its space. Use the highest notes as a melody, or the bottom notes for a bass track, etc. Change some of the sustained notes to be rhythmic, and so forth. This way, you’ll get the bulk of your song done without accidental clashing notes!
Repeat all of this to make different sections, then arrange a song form once you have enough material. Work on transitions. Spend a few days moving some notes to new emotional highs, especially in the “golden section” (about two-thirds through). At this point, you can do whatever else you usually do when composing — but it’s safe, since you’ve made the bulk from your initial DNA and avoided octaves.
If you want to add some real tension and scare people, use the pseudo-octave on purpose! For some mild chills, you can melodically traverse the pseudo-octave, not playing them at the same time but traveling from one to the other. You can also try moving some notes “outside” to experiment a little, but always be sure to save copies of your song so you can go back to any prior nicer version, in case BP turns evil.

Final Thoughts

After all this, I still can’t fully explain how I compose in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale. It’s half sculpting, half listening to what the tuning wants to become. Once you stop expecting octaves to feel like home, and deliberately use the tritave as the frame, after weeks, months, or perhaps it might take years of immersion, the ear can lock into the tritave — the 3:1 harmonic frame that replaces the octave in BP — until it actually feels like an octave.

For me, the tritaves sometimes genuinely sound like an octave, which is both disconcerting and exciting. When that happens, I have to remind myself that I’m not actually hearing a literal octave, but that my brain is just learning to find symmetry in a different geometry that I’m still only partially wired for.

On the flip side, I’ve found that BP is wonderful for avant-garde atonal music. Playing random BP notes can sound very smooth. Many of my electronic music students had no musical background, such as dancers tasked with composing their own impressionistic performance music. BP was a great solution for many of them. They would have more fun in BP, focusing primarily on shaping random note clusters over time, layering the sounds, while not stressing about chords or melody or other stereotypical music devices they weren’t familiar with.

But there is an even greater reward for those who compose very deliberate tonal music in BP, using the tritave as you would use an octave, and using inversions and transpositions as we do in octave based tunings. Eventually your brain will rewire and something beautiful starts to happen: new shapes of consonance appear, melodies begin to make sense in their own strange gravity, and you’ll hear the tritave take on the function of the octave. If you’re really tuned in, you may convince yourself you can hear inversions in BP!

That will be the moment you realize you’ve crossed over into the Twilight Zone of tunings — the uncharted dimension of the Bohlen-Pierce Scale.

Click to watch eight fun mini-movies written in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale