Michael Gogins wrote:
> 
> It is a historical fact that most genres of music in all cultures have an
> identifiable, fairly regular meter.
> It is equally a historical fact that most genres of music have "scales" of 
> repeated pitch-classes, usually no more than about 12. Surely
> this means something. 

Off of the top of my inept and flat head, I would guess that this means that
computers are a late arrival to the arena of compositional influences.  

As for the meter,  I would guess that it is primarily a device that allows 
multiple musicians to perform together with any coherency whatsoever.  The 
singly voiced spoken word is not ugly when heard over time, but it is 
necessarily under the sole dictation and performance of the speaker.  A
superficial analysis of the timing of the speech would reveal much randomness,
although most listeners could attest to the high or poor quality of the 'timing'.

Anything more complex than this, meaning more than one performer, requires extremely 
accurate timing queues, which can only be negotiated by a human performer through 
natural anticipation. The only natural sense of timing which is innate in the 
human psyche that I am aware of is that of static, repetitive timing.  Just 
as we choose to use a common unit of measurement of money or distance as nations, 
we must, as tiny performing nations (simultaneous musical performers) latch on 
to some sort of framework, however arbitrary or crude, so that the receptive 
ear can find a fruitful union in the multiple signals that she might encounter 
while auditioning a performance of music.

As for the commonality of scales, my argument would be the same.  If the 
entire continuum of pitches were to assault the palette of the every day
composer of years ago, he might have been troubled with problems, not only 
of communicating the exact pitches that he chose to his performers, but
in many cases finding the labor to construct the instruments that would
be necessary to produce those pitches with predictability and reliability.

Today an infant frontier has been born.  

Suppose I want two identical sounds to be played, but one to be detuned
to such a slight degree that it would cycle phase with the other, once
every 14 seconds.  I then might desire to make this 14 second cycle
integral to the nature of the piece.  When could we have done this with
sounds, with any quotient of productivity, other than in the last 10 years?

It is truly a golden age gentlemen, and I might venture to say that the
absence of these new parameters in our historical definition of (even good)
music may be explained by the extremely shallow imprint that their possibility
and availablility have so far left on the timeline of music.

Toby