I love Sethares work, but to use it in its full generality, we'd want arbitrary timbres. In practice, most of our timbres are highly harmonic. Speaking of whic

I love Sethares work, but to use it in its full generality, we'd want arbitrary timbres. In practice, most of our timbres are highly harmonic. Speaking of which, another theorist, Dmitry Tymoczko, has some fascinating theories on harmony that you might like in his book A Geometry of Music. A few years ago, when I was reading his and Sethares's work, I really felt like their ideas put together would make a fascinating grand theory of tonal music.