Whole Tone Scale

The Whole Tone scale is a 6-note scale in the symmetric family. Weightless and dreamlike — six equal whole steps with no leading tone, so nothing pulls anywhere. Blurry, floating, and faintly unsettling, like a dream sequence. Heard in: Impressionist piano (Debussy's "Voiles"), Thelonious Monk's runs, dream-sequence film cues, and the augmented and 7#5 chords it fits in jazz. Like every scale, it is defined by the semitone distances between its degrees, so the same pattern produces the scale from any starting note. Pick a tonic below to see the notes it contains.