[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"?