West Asian maqam has 24 notes, Indian classical has 22 notes, Indonesian gamelan has 5 or 7 notes. What would be the ratios that sound pleasurable now?
What is or isn't pleasurable is a matter of cultural training, and treating them as absolute facts is what I found frustrating in the books that I was complaining about.
Indeed. Bobby McFerrin has a demonstration where, regardless of culture, the pentatonic scale is universal. For the record, a just major pentatonic scale is the notes with the intervals (from the root note) 1, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2, and 5/3.
What is or isn't pleasurable is a matter of cultural training, and treating them as absolute facts is what I found frustrating in the books that I was complaining about.