[eftpotrm]

It's not just that; the musical intervals we tend to favour are based around natural resonances and constructive / destructive interference. Hence why a perfect fifth sounds good and a diminished fifth jars; the waveforms don't compliment each other.

I'm willing to be persuaded and don't claim to have made a large study of this but I'm yet to hear a microtonal tuning that didn't just sound off. The sounds actively work against each other because the resonances just aren't there.

(I'm aware in this that modern keyboards are even tempered and so we don't actually _quite_ have perfect intervals any more, but the differences at that level are far smaller.)

[gbog]

Don't be afraid to be right. I did study music theory and I can confirm that the intervals as we know them are just a way to modelize the natural physical relationships between the waves we hear. It is a way to remeber where to put your finger on a violin to make the two string sound good together in a given harmonic context.

One can alway declare to prefer microtonal or whatever invention, but the level interference (or harmony) between pitched sounds can be determined rationaly. This, for once, is not placable under cultural relativism. That's why it is probable that quater tones in Indian or Iranian music are not really tones, and are more like little bends to the natural scale.

(This fact do not please avant-gardists, because it means there is roughly nothing new to invent in this field, but reality is not supposed to always be pleasant, right?)

By the way, I couldn't read the OP (blocked), sorry if my contrib is not related enough.

[ThomPete]

And I guess also why they don't really use chord progressions like we do in the west no?