[TheOtherHobbes]

There are much better overviews of this from Sethares and Tymoczko.

Consonance is somewhat frequency-dependent. For more, Google Critical Band and ERB.

The happy/sad idea is pretty much a high-school oversimplification. It's true for beginners, not at all true beyond that.\

It's quite rare to find music with straight major and/or minor triads with no other colours.

[acjohnson55]

I also jumped straight to the bibliography to look for those two. Not seeing any reference to their work is disappointing and makes me a little pessimistic that digesting the entire piece will be worthwhile, as a scientific piece. He references Helmholtz, but his theories have been surpassed for more than a century.

But hopefully I'll get around to reading this at some point. It's one of my favorite topics. I wrote up my own attempt to explain the Western music system here: https://fakestoryofmusic.com

I've also been working on something smaller that focuses on major/minor tonality, specifically. But it's further from being in a place where I want to share it.

[pitchlatte]

to add, all of this doesn’t account for music outside of that which is a direct descendant of 15th and 16th century contrapuntal music, aka the sort defined by exactly the medieval texts it pokes fun at. any fusions are outside scope, let alone entire non european cultures of music. incredibly ethnocentric and blinkered premise.

[calf]

Are there any readings would you recommend to read if I play classical piano, and especially for Romantic and post-Romantic music ranging from Chopin/Liszt to Debussy/Ravel?

[acjohnson55]

If you want to go way deep, check out Tymoczko's first book: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html

It's a challenging read, but extremely thorough and enlightening. Tymoczko wrote a follow up that extends and reformulates his theories, but I haven't gotten through it yet.