Steve Schwartz (about the musical preferences of monkeys):

>The authors were loathe to speculate much on the meaning of these results
>and noted that there was no scientific, objective way to measure a degree
>of atonality.  Is this really true?

I think that this is true.  Measuring atonality is just like measuring
the "degree of legibility" of a text.  In many cases it depends on who is
listening.  There are people who hear tonics and dominants in Schoenberg's
pre-dodecaphonic works, and there are many works of XX century music of
which it would be difficult to say whether they are atonal or not.

Pablo Massa
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