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reportedly present, yes .. but the debate is still hot on universal.

I was asking to tease out some PoV perspective, again Gamelan doesn't neccessarily have powers of two, or 12, etc divisions of a doubling (or Octave, if we're using that term); it's a non western style of percussion that has a suprising number of local variations (it's essentially near unique to Balinese culture) in divisions and tunings.

The Octave wikipedia entry includes:

  Octave equivalence is a part of most musical cultures, but is far from universal in "primitive" and early music

but gets woolly on examples.

Cheers for the response, appreciated.

by tshaddox3 hours ago|

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Yeah, that sentence on Wikipedia is a bit unclear though. It might be merely claiming that, for some musical cultures, we don’t have a written record of an explicit notion of octave equivalence or tone name circularity.

But I suspect there’s a clear biological mechanism which makes it easy to mistake one octave for another from any source of roughly harmonic sound. This is due to the similarity in the overtones of two harmonic sounds that differ by an octave. I would be surprised if this mechanism isn’t universal, although its on various musical systems can obviously vary a lot.