>There is of course a questionable degree of dissonance that can be tolerated, but the most obvious fact is that the brain can well be conditioned to accept and even enjoy these dissonances, as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced.
I disagree. I have listened to a fair amount of music in just intonation, and I am capable of hearing the tuning flaws of 12 equal temperament, but I am still capable of enjoying dissonance, and of appreciating the artistic flexibility that those tuning flaws give you.
This article presents a very limited view of music. Just intonation does have artistic merit (check out the works of Harry Partch), but it's not the only valid form of music. The human brain doesn't count frequencies, and integer ratios are not fundamental to perception of consonance. They just happen to work well with a common class of timbres. But for other timbres, e.g. tuned percussion, other tuning systems can sound more consonant. You can even hear this in Western classical music: pianos are tuned with non-integer octaves to compensate for the inharmonicity of their strings. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
William Sethares published a more general model of consonance perception that handles all these cases:
https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf
I previously posted about this on HN with some more background and references:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638307
I disagree. I have listened to a fair amount of music in just intonation, and I am capable of hearing the tuning flaws of 12 equal temperament, but I am still capable of enjoying dissonance, and of appreciating the artistic flexibility that those tuning flaws give you.
This article presents a very limited view of music. Just intonation does have artistic merit (check out the works of Harry Partch), but it's not the only valid form of music. The human brain doesn't count frequencies, and integer ratios are not fundamental to perception of consonance. They just happen to work well with a common class of timbres. But for other timbres, e.g. tuned percussion, other tuning systems can sound more consonant. You can even hear this in Western classical music: pianos are tuned with non-integer octaves to compensate for the inharmonicity of their strings. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
William Sethares published a more general model of consonance perception that handles all these cases:
https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf
I previously posted about this on HN with some more background and references:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638307