Sethares showed shocking ignorance towards the history of the actual usage of dissonance and consonance by practicing musicians and theorists in the history of

Sethares showed shocking ignorance towards the history of the actual usage of dissonance and consonance by practicing musicians and theorists in the history of Western music. The most obvious being that the category of dissonance and consonance has shifted over time. The most famous example being the perfect 4th, which has a simple ratio of 4:3 and should be a consonance but was treated as a dissonance against the bass for most of music history in the west (even though Sethares' graph categorise it clearly as a consonance, contrary to common practice). At around around the same time, the thirds and sixths began to be considered as consonances either, whereas previously they were regarded as dissonant and were used sparingly (composers generally avoided thirds in the final chord until around the end of the 15th century). There's nothing inherently "good" or "bad" about dissonances and consonances, the Western ear has been trained to recognise instability in dissonances and stability in consonances, hence the ancient prohibition of dissonances in the final chord of the piece (a rule that has since been discarded). The trajectory of classical music in the 20th century shows that people can indeed get used to music which do not take that as granted. In fact, the almost unspeakable secret about dissonances is that they sound as good, even better than consonances. How else can the suspension play such an important part in western music up until then? Sethares is of course free to define consonance and dissonance in his idiosyncratic way unconnected to common usage, but of course his definition and discoveries would then be of no use to those who use the ordinary definition.