> But would they recognize 12 tones scales? It's possible that they might, but if they have any kind of musical discernment they might find it objectionable un

> But would they recognize 12 tones scales? It's possible that they might, but if they have any kind of musical discernment they might find it objectionable unless they're as lazy as we are. 12-tone equal temperament works more-or-less because it gives good-enough approximations of almost all the small-number ratios that a musician making relatively straightforward music would care about. However, thirds and sixths are pretty out-of-tune and frequency ratios with sevens in them like 7:6 and 7:4 don't have any reasonable approximation. On the other hand, 41-tone equal temperament is a much better system in just about any way you might care about, except that it makes building physical instruments more complicated because there's more notes to worry about. 53 is also really good, but that's even more notes. And then there's pure just intonation, which is a great option if you don't really care about being able to transpose freely to/from any key, but you want each note pitch to be dead-on exact. In other words, 12-TET is a kind of local optimum that we're stuck in for historical reasons and because the barriers to change are high. You might as well ask if an alien civilization would recognize the concept of daylight-savings-time, or the QWERTY keyboard, or the electoral college.