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by widdershins 4694 days ago
Your anxiety at the tritone is not just a culturally learned response - as the Wikipedia article you linked explains, the harmonic ratios in a tritone really are mathematically 'dissonant' when compared to, say, a perfect fifth or major third.
1 comments

A mathematical explanation of consonance and dissonance in music is appealing for its simplicity, but it is somewhat of a reductionist approach to understanding listeners' experience of music. There are many elements of the European musical tradition that, though they sound consonant to our ears, cannot be explained on mathematical grounds. The minor mode and the minor triad are notable examples. A more subtle and insidious case is that of equal temperament.

Background reading: "Musical Consonance and Dissonance: A Cultural Criterion" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/426253)