Pythagorean said:
The octave is the only thing in music that is consistent across cultures and can be recognized by laymen (and perhaps the fifth). The octave has the same meaning across cultures too: it's the beginning and the end; it marks the cyclic auditory property (the octave is perceived as the 'same note'). The fifth serves no universal purpose. Even if it can be recognized by another culture, it likely doesn't have a musical meaning to them - it would just be a neat sound observation. Higher integer ratios (like the third) won't translate in a meaningful way. If you went and tried to explain it to a musician from another culture, it would be a lot like an acoustic scientist trying to explain some random acoustics facts to you - you might be able to understand the logic of it, but you'd likely walk away having not gained any musical appreciation of it.
Here's what I think: I think if they "recognize" the octave; two notes an octave apart, played simultaneously, then they would judge the addition of the fifth and third to have enriched the octave, to have fleshed it out, to be supporting its "special" properties. This is something we could only test by taking a large poll over many cultures.
If we found people who
didn't like the sound, it would be important to hear their objections to it. If they object to it on the basis it's too sweet, too static, too boring, we would know they do experience it as "enriched," but that they have a cultural/artistic bias against that "nice" kind of sound. On the other hand if they described it as sour, bitter, painful, irritating, and such, we would know it's not a matter of taste: the third and fifth authentically confuse their experience of the octave. (However, even in the latter case, care has to be taken to make sure the nature of their objection is clear. "Terrible!, Horrible! Unlistenable!," and equally
vague objections might only indicate the experience of a
surfeit of sweetness, niceness, regularity. The look on someone's face if you put half a cup of sugar in their coffee might be indistinguishable from the look on their face if you put half a cup of bitter dish soap in it.)
The goal is to explain why that kind of bird chattering bothered the guy back there, earlier in the thread, why it seems so obviously unmusical. Why do some sequences of tones sound like the opposite of 'cheescake for the ears?' Are there, in fact, cultures where the addition of the fifth and third would turn an octave into that "opposite of cheescake?' Can people really become so steeped in non-harmonic music that harmony is experienced as bitter?
Here's an excerpt from an essay written in Nature:
The point that "acclimatization to a convention can completely override these acoustic facts," is non-controversial, and I don't dispute it. I would have you note, though, that it assumes a "standard" ("these acoustic facts") that is being over-ridden. Every culture has an accumulated system of distortion algorithms that are deviations from a standard which that culture may only unconsciously sense and never have defined. If you look at the prehistoric cave paintings of Europe there doesn't seem to be any direct exploration of symmetry or geometry at all, but the level of artistic sophistication is so high they can't possibly have not unconsciously assumed symmetry and geometry. It's as if they jumped right over all that elementary stuff right to sophistication. And it doesn't mean they would be baffled or repelled by a circle or rectangle. A major chord might just be too trivial for many cultures to bother with.