[thomasqbrady]

I guess I wasn’t clear. I’m not saying the 4th and 5th notes don’t have a special sound to anyone. I’m saying that 1) just exactly how important their resonance is to you is influenced by your culture. It’s not that atonal musicians didn’t notice the resonance. They weren’t drawn to it as much. 2) The logic given was “if you want your scale to include the 4th and 5th, then 12 notes is inevitable.” The “if you want your scale to include the 4th and 5th” is the a built in assumption that you want something like the western scale, so it doesn’t seem that impressive to me that they then arrive at the 12-tone scale.