Japanese traditional music is primarily pentatonic or heptatonic and aligns closely to western 12-tone equal temperament. Contemporary Japanese music is entirel

Japanese traditional music is primarily pentatonic or heptatonic and aligns closely to western 12-tone equal temperament. Contemporary Japanese music is entirely compatible with western music theory. That's a happy coincidence for a Japanese-American project, but it's distinctly inconvenient for Arabic, Persian or Indonesian musicians who use notes that have no useful equivalent in the western scale.