Frank,

You misread my words. Admittedly I could probably have phrased it more carefully (note the many hurried typos I made). I didn't claim that we innately prefer thirds to some other interval for some physiological reason, but rather that we prefer just-tuned thirds (i.e. those exactly 5/4 the fundamental frequency) rather than equal-tempered thirds (those about 1.26 times the fundamental). I was comparing thirds in different tunings, not thirds to another interval in the same tuning. I would observe that by physiological standards, fourths and fifths are more consonant than thirds (or at least have more harmonics in common), so if I'd brought it up at all I'd have used it as an example that they were more natural than thirds. But I'm not making any such claim, since both are beat-free intervals.

As to consonance/dissonance; I tried very hard to separate the physiological observation of consonance/dissonance from the artistic judgement of value. You either didn't get this, or refuse to accept it. Fine, but we have to have some common language or we are making noise. *As I use it* consonance is not primarily a value judgement, it is a physical fact. By training our ears can get better at detecting it, or alternatively worse if we learn *not* to make the distinction by listening to a musical tradition which does not make the distinction. But to claim that this means it is not a physical/physiological phenomenon is tatamount to claiming that distinguishing red and green are cultural constructs (and I'm *not* talking about words here) because some men are red/green colorblind, or that tuning guitar strings to standard tuning is a matter of opinion because some people have not trained their ear to hear the difference.

I like to listen to blues, which positively encourages playing minor third melody notes over major thirds in the harmony. I judge this to be musically good, but that does not change the fact that the two notes are extremely dissonant when played together. Dissonance can be better than consonance, but it does us no good to re-define them to be whichever we prefer at the moment. I do think that there is a clear *tendancy* to prefer consonance, but this *value judgement* can change depending on musical context.

As for reducing music to physics, I thought I was very clear that I made no such claim. Could you point to the message where I made this claim? What I have said is that there is quite a lot of physics and physiology involved with music, and we make our artistic choices within that framework (for example, my insistence that dissonance, even extreme dissonance may be judged very desirable in a particular context). Would you claim that someone who said that "pigmentation is a matter of some substances having frequency-dependent absorption of light" is therefore trying to reduce painting to physics? It ain't the pigments, it's where you put them. :-)

As for the lack of data, my understanding is that pretty much every musical tradition (and before someone uses some singular counterexample as a disproof, remember that Aristotle tells us that we're talking about universal tendancies, not a lack of a single exception, so we need trends or patterns of exceptions) has at least the notes of the major pentatonic scale, which also happens to be just about the most consonant notes one can find. Further, that such scales are particularly preferred for children's music, implying that they are particularly intelligible to untrained ears. I'm merely quoting my musical betters here, but that would support the idea that there are natural physiological tendancies involved. There is an aweful lot of major-scale music harmonized by I, IV, and V chords in the mudcat database--do you think this is purely an accident?

Dustin