> So this aspect of music we can attribute to innate psycho-acoustics or even physics rather than cultural bias.
It's inextricable from cultural bias, though the physics obviously plays some role. The cultural bias comes into play more strongly around the question of how much dissonance is "good" vs. "bad", and how the more dissonant bits should interplay with the more consonant bits of music.
Certainly, "more consonant = better" isn't true in any culture I can think of.... Imagine an orchestra that tunes up, then they all play the note A in various octaves for 3 hours.
Possibly also worth mentioning that this isn't quite correct:
> The traditional classical Western twelve-note scale consists of the 12 simplest frequency ratios
You're thinking of the major scale, maybe? The ratios for a tritone, major 7th, etc. are more complex (and not the first 12 simplest...) and if you try to actually come up with ratios for an even-tempered scale you're really in trouble.
It's inextricable from cultural bias, though the physics obviously plays some role. The cultural bias comes into play more strongly around the question of how much dissonance is "good" vs. "bad", and how the more dissonant bits should interplay with the more consonant bits of music.
Certainly, "more consonant = better" isn't true in any culture I can think of.... Imagine an orchestra that tunes up, then they all play the note A in various octaves for 3 hours.
Possibly also worth mentioning that this isn't quite correct:
> The traditional classical Western twelve-note scale consists of the 12 simplest frequency ratios
You're thinking of the major scale, maybe? The ratios for a tritone, major 7th, etc. are more complex (and not the first 12 simplest...) and if you try to actually come up with ratios for an even-tempered scale you're really in trouble.