[jariel]

So that's some valiant rhetoric, but I don't think you've made the case.

There are dozens of scales within 'Western Music' and there's many musical variants which allow 'notes in between'.

Stringed instruments easily allow for the variation in chord intervals as you've mentioned, yet they're generally not used in the manner you've described, because I don't think that's the tradeoff being made.

("holding a base note, and the note five keys above it" will sound totally different depending on the base note you pick. This comes necessarily from the math." - I basically don't buy this. A perfect 5th sounds essentially the same whatever the root note is)

There are far more forms, far more instruments, far more variation of ensembles (how many ways to re-arrange 50 different instruments).

And it's spawned 100's of genres.

So even if the 'interval argument' holds, and I don't think it does, it does make up for that much.

There are many examples, but the best to illustrate the diversity in a snapshot would be Jazz.

[snickell]

A perfect fifth is the only chord in the equal tempered scale which is very close to a simple (small prime factors in the ratio) just intonation, they're only like 0.25% different. Not surprisingly, its one of the most common chord components in modern ET to hold for long periods. An equal tempered perfect fifth really close to a 3:2 ratio "just fifth".

On ET, /all/ the major thirds express exactly the same ratio, as do the fourths, minor thirds, etc etc etc. The tuning is designed carefully to give this regularity. Every chord has exactly the same ratios involved, no matter what note you start it from.

That's very much not true of just intonation scales, and then there's the many scales lying between equal and just like well-tempered, etc etc.

Most music that isn't derived from the western scales has tunings that are expresable very accurately in just intonation, and do not align well with ET tunings (until the tunings shifted with cheap electronic ET-tuned instruments).

Western/culturally-most-common 12 tone-ET music (aided partly by western instruments like midi keyboards) definitely are the most common today, but that is a relatively modern phenom.

This isn't to say that "the old was better" or "the new is better".... they're just... tradeoffs.

Dismissing one of the most seriously pursued classical music traditions (whole extended families sole-y professionally devoted to it for hundreds of years allows massive intergenerational knowledge transfer and thereby accumulation) as being less flexible because its less flexible in the axis your culture has particularly prized strikes me as.....