The turisk have 9 microtones per full step. This gives the scale more 'perfect' sounding pitch.
Musical scales have a very sound physical basis. Two notes sound good together when their frequencies easily ring together. For instance, an octave (which is present in all music all over the world, but just called differently) is two notes where one note has double the frequency of the other. So one note will make a full period while the other makes two. This is pleasant, but a tad boring. You can make an octave of your octave, still pretty, still boring. It's a dead end.
The next pleasant sound is when one note makes 2 periods and the other 3. These are your forths and fifths in western music. These intervals give endless possibilities. A forth of the fifth gives back your base note, similar to a fifth of your forth. But! Fifth of fifth and forth of forth go endless. Each will result in a new note that sounds less pleasant but more interesting together with the base note.
(the forth is the inverse of the fifth: forth(fifth(base)) = base AND fifth(forth(base)) = base. I'll only talk about fifths hence forth)
A scale is an 'arbitrary' bunch of these notes together sorted by pitch. All scales used in the world can be constructed out of fifths. How many fifths to make a scale? We usually stop when the note is _almost_ equal to the base; that way there is an even representation of the frequency spectrum whilst having many notes that sound good together. For instance, western music, the 12th consecutive fifth almost sounds like the base (it's frequency is 1.3% off) The microtonal scales 53th consecutvit fifth is only 0.21% off. The pentatonic scale which uses only 5 notes, is 5.3% off.
5 notes: 5.3% error
7 notes: 6.8% error
12 notes: 1.3% error
41 notes: 1.1% error
53 notes: .21% error
So you see that pentatonic is nice and easy, cause your instrument only needs to play 5 notes and all is pleasant. The next amount of notes you need for a smaller error is 12, then 53. So you could say things about effectiveness of amount of notes here.
Another remark: western classical music uses the 12 note scale, but pop music often limits itself to only seven of those.
Here is some psuedo code to play with it yourself:
BASE_NOTE_A = 880
def note(n):
f = BASE_NOTE_A * (3/2)**n
while f > BASE_NOTE_A:
a = a/2
return a
plotted results:
https://pasteboard.co/Hwd7VCw.png