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Bill_McGrath comments on Things you are supposed to like - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure I agree here. I understand the point you are making about ratios of frequencies, but by that logic, equal tempered music would presumably be automatically inferior to music in just intonation, because the consonant intervals are more consonant in just intonation than E-12 tuning.
Music that is more consistently consonant is not better; all pieces composed entirely of octaves and fifths aren't inherently better than all pieces that also have thirds (or any other less-harmonic interval you care to name). This also assumes that Western music theory is the only valid type; musical languages consisting of a non-diatonic system are not automatically inferior.
EDIT: I'd like to add that I'm inclined to think there is a degree of objective musical quality.
This isn't an assumption. It's an empirical fact. Almost all music around the world uses a diatonic or pentatonic scale. The pentatonic favors such intervals even more strongly. The odds against this happening, if there were even one other equally-good possible non-harmonic scale, are astronomical. QED.
Contrary to popular belief, music doesn't "use" theoretical constructs such as the diatonic scale; listeners use them to interpret music.
In other words, the important fact about the diatonic scale is not whether it is presented explicitly in music, but that even when it isn't, it is still the basis for a listener's comprehension of the pitch structure.
(Also note that the pentatonic scale is a strict subset of the diatonic scale.)
The work presented in this comment (link to audio examples) makes a convincing case that the consonance of "diatonic" scale intervals is simply an artifact of common timbres/sound spectra (which in turn are due to the physical makeup of most musical instruments), combined with familiarity. The music presented there sounds "consonant" and "harmonious" to me in a way that most atonal music simply doesn't.
(I am linking 4hodmt's comment here only because it's directly relevant and I don't expect its author to join this subthread. Any upvotes should be directed there.)
What about music that does not use those scales? And 1-3-5 chords are not present in all pentatonic systems. By what standard do you consider this music to be objectively superior? Is it something based on harmonicity?
Well, yeah. That's the only reason that people still talk about just intonation - it's considered a virtue that its intervals sound cleaner than equally tempered ones. Equal temperament is the standard because it allows transposition between keys, not because of some objection to how pure and clean just intervals are.
Another potential fix is to adjust timbres (i.e. sound spectra) so that they sound cleaner in equal temperament. See this example (MP3) from William Sethares' work (ironically, the only 12-TET piece from his freely-available samples). Sounds kind of uncanny and off-key to me, but that could be due to being unfamiliar with alt. tunings. YMMV.
ETA: The Hammond organ also used 12-TET frequencies to generate its "harmonic partials", so it was effectively just as "clean" in 12-TET as other instruments are in just intonation. On the other hand, many people would judge the effect as excessively "bland" and "indistinct". But the sound spectrum of the Hammond organ was not very complex to begin with; applying the same fix to other instruments will probably give more appealing results.
Yes, I understand that. What I'm arguing here is that a musical system with greater harmonicity is not neccessarily objectively better.
This is talking about music as if it isn't inherently based on time. If anything, a large number of consonances would make music sound much worse, because "dissonance" in many ways is simply sounds that require resolution of tension. If there is no tension, there is no resolution of tension. Dissonance is commonly believed to be the thing that actually makes music interesting.
Of course there is music that uses lots of consonance, but typically they will use some other device (rhythm, rising tones) to increase tension so they have something to resolve.
And I suspect that is the case, but haven't had the opportunity to test it. It would be interesting to do blind tests using computer-generated versions of the same music using both scales.
This may not work. Temperment is difficult to adjust. As equal temperment is so ubiquitous nowadays, people will often hear non-equal temperments as simply out-of-tune and dislike them on that. Our ears are very much used to equal temperments.
But composition is not that only thing that music is. There is also performance and musical interpretation, and those will drastically affect your opinions on a particular composition. Computer-generated versions will probably not help your opinion of a piece...