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 [log in to unmask]