A scale is a group of notes that for some reason have been grouped together. Knowing about scales can be very useful when performing or composing music.
Several studies (e.g., Sewitch et al., 2003) identified the lack of a formal assessment of content validity as a limitation to scale development. Future research may want to include a longitudinal study during the scale development process to provide further support for construct validity.
Definition
A scale is a ratio between a dimension of a model and the same feature in the real figure or object. It is useful in drawing maps, blueprints and models, since it allows the dimensions to be interpreted with greater ease.
Scale is also used to describe a series of steps or degrees in which something rises, such as the social hierarchy or rank of different animals. It can also be used to refer to a musical scale, which is a fixed sequence of tones that ascend or descend according to certain interval patterns.
These interval patterns are often defined by the name of a specific note or tonic. The most common examples are diatonic, chromatic and major scales.
Origin
The term scale originates from the Latin word for ladder. It is used in the musical sense to describe a graduated series of intervals dividing what is called an octave. There are many different scales found in the music of various cultures around the world. These range from grama in India, dastgah in Iran and maqam in Muslim cultures to the major and minor scales in Western music.
Despite their differences, these scales all function in similar ways. Highly developed, art-music traditions of literate cultures often have rules and conventions governing the use of specific scales that remain unchanged over time. This allows for the preservation of a specific sound and style of music that is unique to a particular culture.
Function
Scales are used to transform data values into visual variables, such as position and colour. They can be linear, square root, log, sequential, quantized or threshold scales.
The scales library in ggplot2 and the tidyverse provides a wide variety of labelling functions. Using these you can control how breaks, labeling and legends are generated from a domain and range.
For example, if you wanted to create a bar chart from a list of numbers you would use the function scaleBand. This splits the domain into bands and calculates the geometry of each band taking into account any padding between the numbers. This is a great way to quickly build a bar chart.
Design
Scale is an essential detail in any design process. It determines the size of every element in a deliverable and shapes its overall composition. It can make or break a project.
A common real-world use of scale is to shrink objects or spaces down to their actual dimensions, like on a map or blueprint. It can also enlarge objects to highlight their details, such as in scale drawings of buildings or fashion dresses.
A good design can adapt to multiple scales. For example, a child-friendly water bottle can still function the way it was designed to when shared by multiple children. For this purpose, designers must understand how different scales affect functionality.
Materials
Scale models are usually constructed of plastic, wood, or metal. They are used to create a variety of designs, from aircraft to automobiles to spaceships. They are also popular in many schools as a tool to teach students about different sizes.
Extrinsic SE factors include workpiece geometric size and surface morphology, and cutting-tool dimensions. Intrinsic SE factors are the density and microstructural grain size of materials, as well as the size of precipitates and second-phase particles and the distance between them.
These SE factors can generate a wide range of scale-dependent behaviours, phenomena, and processing performances during the multiscale material machining and deformation-based manufacturing of meso- or microscale parts or components. This paper explores their manifestations and mechanisms through case studies of microscale machining processes and micromanufacturing.
Applications
Scales are used in a wide variety of applications. For instance, a scale drawing can be used to shrink or enlarge a real-world object to create a more accurate representation. This is often useful for making blueprints and helping designers, architects, and machinists work with models that are too large to hold in their actual size.
A scalable application can handle large volumes of users and data traffic. This is important because it helps to ensure a consistent workflow 24/7. It also allows for flexibility when it comes to seasonal events that may project an increase in data usage, app traffic and/or transactions.