In
music theory,
limit or
harmonic limit is a way of characterizing the
harmony found in a piece or
genre of music, or the harmonies that can be made using a particular
scale. The term
limit was introduced by
Harry Partch, who used it to give an
upper bound on the complexity of harmony; hence the name. "Roughly speaking, the larger the limit number, the more harmonically complex and potentially
dissonant will the
intervals of the
tuning be perceived." "A scale belonging to a particular prime limit has a distinctive hue that makes it aurally distinguishable from scales with other limits."