This is not the first paper to link the harmonic series to Pythagorean / just intonation style music, Google brought me this from 10 years earlier for instance:

This is not the first paper to link the harmonic series to Pythagorean / just intonation style music, Google brought me this from 10 years earlier for instance: http://in.music.sc.edu/fs/bain/atmi02/hs/hs.pdf http://in.music.sc.edu/fs/bain/atmi02/hs/hs.pdf In fact, this paper references Paul Hindemith in the 1940s, so I suspect that the notion of linking the harmonic series to music has been around a very long time. I think the real problem is the very dismissive topic in section 4. That's what completely turned me off this paper. Dissonance (in Western music terms) has a huge role in music, and even that 20th century purely dissonant music has a place. (Take music like Penderecki's early stuff eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp3BlFZWJNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp3BlFZWJNA . It sounds "awful" in a sense, but that's really the point, and certainly has its place -- The Shining wouldn't have been the same if Kubrick had used Thomas Tallis instead. :) ). Beyond fully atonal music, a lot of Western art music relies on "dissonances" of some sort to advance melodic development (even in standard pop there's a little of it sometimes). I don't know many pieces based solely on the tritone. A lot of Western composers in the past used the tritone in key places because it was rather nasty sounding, and it was condemned as "the Devil's interval" culturally. Thus it could easily represent "evil" or "sinister" in your tone poems and operas. Voice leading is a huge core principle behind the circle of fifths or the reverse circle of fourths; from the paper (in bashing the circle as a "red herring") it sounds like he doesn't understand the core behind why the circle exists at all, or has chosen to ignore the principle of voice leading for some reason. The circle of fifths is more melody than harmony, I personally felt puzzled why he felt it would be a criticism for a harmony paper. I also found the dismissal of other cultural scales (which indeed generally are less, with pentatonic probably the most common), er, tone deaf. The best way I think to explore the scales of a large portion of music cultures (there are exceptions) is to think more on Pythagorean terms, not on chromatic terms. Saying that "their culture has simply never made use of the rest of the available parameter space" is looking at it the wrong way.