[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.

[morshu9001]

It just means that there's at least one aspect of music that everyone agrees on. Harmony might be favored more by some people than others, but they're all hearing harmony. And not everyone developed scales, but all the ones who did agreed on octave equivalence.

Also, idk who finds consistent rhythm completely wrong. Some music breaks it more than others. Is there some culture that will hear Mozart and think "what, this isn't even music"?