[bigyabai]

In fairness, your teacher was absolutely correct and would have shamed themselves if they gave you the point for that one. What humanity considers to be music predates tonality and harmony entirely. There were thousands of years where humans satisfied themselves without the help of a tuning fork, carefully-constructed scales, sheet music notation or instruments of any kind. It is a fantasy that music doesn't exist until cultures find some sort of audible ley line to follow.

If you want to ascribe their reasoning to "proof by emotion" then you're welcome to make that logical leap, but instantially your teacher was asking you to think outside the anglobox here. You made an unlucky guess, but props to you for trying.

[morshu9001]

I'm not saying I was right, but the teacher's explanation was not what you said. It was that the correct answer is the inoffensive one.

I'm also still not sure about the answer. A lot of unrelated cultures developed music independently and ended up with some kind of rhythm beaten from something. I didn't say they had tuning forks or scales, and ofc 12 tones or 8 notes per scale isn't universal, but there's still the thing about octave equivalence. I did some searching back then and found some scientific papers on this that didn't show a definite conclusion.

[UncleMeat]

Consonance and dissonance between pitches are physical properties. How they relate to the enjoyability of music is culturally constructed.

[morshu9001]

Right. The thing is, I don't know if there's any culture that enjoys completely dissonant music and doesn't enjoy consonance. I like Arabic classical and pop a lot, they use disonance a bit more and also don't always use the 12-ET tuning. But anyone who's developed any kind of tuning, it still divides up an octave, ie the notes reset when the frequency doubles.

[UncleMeat]

So? We have different degrees of dissonance, different uses for dissonance, and different reactions to dissonance across many different musical traditions. I don't see why there would need to be some musical tradition that refuses to ever have octaves in order for us to say that our relationship with consonance and dissonance is culturally constructed.

Gamelan music might be a good example of one where microtonal dissonance is expected basically continuously through a piece.

There is also music that is completely without traditional pitch information (all sorts of percussion traditions).

[morshu9001]

What I mean is, it seems like every culture's music has some things in common, and it's not because all of them are derived from a common ancestor. Isolated people can make music that everyone else will perceive as music, maybe enjoy it too. Some music has very broad appeal. Again I'm not sure, but it's pretty strong to assert that it's absolutely culture-dependent.

[UncleMeat]

But what are they?

You said this:

> One example of many I remember was a social/music class where the prof asked the lecture if there are any innate, non-culture-specific features that make music enjoyable. I raised my hand to say I think so, because octave equivalence seems pretty universal, but the right answer was no.

Does the octave interval make music enjoyable in some non culturally contingent way? I don't think that the evidence for this is super strong. There's music from around the world that would consider harmonic motion from consonance to dissonance to consonance to be wrong. There's music from around the world that would consider metered rhythm to be wrong.