This is amazing too read it :
«When we use instruments like the bonang, Pythagoras’s special numbers go out the window and we encounter entirely new patterns of consonance and dissonance," Dr. Harrison said.
"The shape of some percussion instruments means that when you hit them, and they resonate, their frequency components don’t respect those traditional mathematical relationships. That’s when we find interesting things happening."
"Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of their shape and physics, are what we would call ’inharmonic.’"»
«
The researchers found that the bonang’s consonances mapped neatly onto the particular musical scale used in the Indonesian culture from which it comes. These consonances cannot be replicated on a Western piano, for instance, because they would fall between the cracks of the scale traditionally used.
"Our findings challenge the traditional idea that harmony can only be one way, that chords have to reflect these mathematical relationships. We show that there are many more kinds of harmony out there, and that there are good reasons why other cultures developed them," Dr. Harrison said.
Importantly, the study suggests that its participants—not trained musicians and unfamiliar with Javanese music—were able to appreciate the new consonances of the bonang’s tones instinctively.»
And now this explain why atonal music as Schoenberg is so boring and difficult to fit in the human body ... :
«Importantly, the study suggests that its participants -- not trained musicians and unfamiliar with Javanese music -- were able to appreciate the new consonances of the bonang's tones instinctively.
"Music creation is all about exploring the creative possibilities of a given set of qualities, for example, finding out what kinds of melodies can you play on a flute, or what kinds of sounds can you make with your mouth," Harrison said.
"Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don't need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy."»
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-pythagoras-wrong-universal-musical-harmonies.html