Ok I see what you are saying. I guess I didn't really get this across but I'm not saying that more consonance always means more listening pleasure. As with the

Ok I see what you are saying. I guess I didn't really get this across but I'm not saying that more consonance always means more listening pleasure. As with the Pythagorean tunings, all consonance and no dissonance can become bland. Dissonant intervals are also a part of the harmonic series as you go further up. The major second that you mentioned is a 16:15 ratio. As far as Jazz chords, many are not as dissonant as you would think. The dominant seventh which makes up the entirety of the blues progression is generally considered dissonant because of the flat 7th, the most 'out of tune' note in western tuning. It actually is an attempt to approximate the interval formed between the 7th and 4th overtones which are a strong consonance. Dissonance is definitely a part of what makes music interesting. I wasn't trying to say that consonant intervals are the only reason for listening pleasure, just pointing out that there's some natural phenomena (harmonic series) that we're approximating or emulating with our music that can explain why we perceive music the way we do or why it sounds beautiful to us. I'm not familiar with gamelan but I found this interesting quote on the page regarding one of its tunings: > ..where instruments are played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart so as to produce interference beating. The beating is ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers, producing stretched octaves as a result. This contributes to the very "agitated" and "shimmering" sound of gamelan ensembles. In the religious ceremonies that contain gamelan, these interference beats are meant to give the listener a feeling of a god's presence or a stepping stone to a meditative state. So in a way, even though the tuning system goes 'outside' the harmonic series, it doesn't completely ignore it but rather 'stretches' some of its intervals, which is what gives the music its otherworldly or mystical feeling.