TAMNAMS
TAMNAMS (Temperament-Agnostic Mos NAMing System) is a system of names for MOS scales alongside their intervals, degrees, and tunings.
MOS names on the wiki generally follow TAMNAMS, and may be found at MOS. Note that while other scales such as 1L 6s may fall under some definitions of diatonic, in TAMNAMS diatonic refers exclusively to 5L 2s; it is recommended to make this sense explicit by saying "MOS diatonic" or "mosdiatonic".
MOS tuning softness spectrum
TAMNAMS reserves "soft" and "hard" for specifically 3:2 and 3:1 respectively, using "soft-of-basic" and "hard-of-basic" for the more general categories. In general, tunings follow a spectrum of:
- equalized
- ultrasoft
- 4:3 (supersoft)
- parasoft
- 3:2 (soft)
- quasisoft
- 5:3 (semisoft)
- minisoft
- basic
- minihard
- 5:2 (semihard)
- quasihard
- 3:1 (hard)
- parahard
- 4:1 (superhard)
- ultrahard
Therefore, Pythagorean diatonic may be called minihard diatonic, or superpyth diatonic may be called ultrahard diatonic.
MOS intervals
MOS intervals are 0-indexed as "1-mosstep", "2-mosstep", "3-mosstep", etc, where the 0-mosstep is the unison. "mos" in "mosstep" may be removed or replaced with a MOS-specific prefix, such as "pel-" for antidiatonic or "jara-" for jaric. The generators are perfect (including the period and the generator as well as the unison), other intervals are major or minor; augmented and diminished behave as in diatonic notation albeit with the MOSchroma instead of the diatonic chroma. Note that in nL ns scales, "perfect" is not used for the non-period generator, which is instead considered to be major or minor.
MOS degrees
Degrees are written equivalently to the interval they make with the tonic, as "mosdegree" rather than "mosstep". However, in writing, they are distinguished if necessary by using "d" for degrees and "s" for intervals, so a m3d makes a m3s interval with the tonic.
