> if it was right, then the happiest music would be entirely octaves

Not necessarily: if you read the essay, one assumption is that the brain is halving and doubling frequencies to fit them all into one frequency magnitude, an obvious optimization for reducing circuitry. If so, then an octave is too simple to fire the recognizer for a particular harmonic series; instead we need an input that places it relative to the other tones even after the halving/doubling.

Consider the fact that we name both middle C and high C as "C" because, even though they are different notes, they sound so similar that we literally deliberately confuse them notationally as they play the same role in harmony: one can be used to replace the other.

> Music is pleasurable when it mostly meets expectations but surprises you as well, IE it sits just outside of what we expect.

Ok, but where do the expectations come from? Your assertion that it is all culturally relative ("nurture") and none from the structure of the most efficient algorithm for recognizing the harmonic series ("nature") has no basis in fact; you just assert it without proof.

In contrast, there is strong evidence for the absolute nature of auditory processing. In the essay, there is a quotation from Daniel Levitin's book "This is your Brain on Music" where it discusses an experiment he witnessed in graduate school where music was played through wiring directly into the brain of an owl. The music was played into the brain with the root removed; when coming out of the brain of the owl, brain had restored the root (see the essay for details).

That means that virtual pitch (1) is created by the structure of the brain, not by a cultural expectation, and (2) further, that it is created by the brain of, not just a human, but of an owl! This is a very strong argument for the assertion that the processing of sound and the artifacts thereof are quite universal, not just across cultures, but across species.

> ratios and how chords derive from that was absolutely part of my education at Berklee

So at Berklee they teach recognizer algorithms and artifacts thereof? I did not know that Berklee is that strong in computer science. The explanation of the experience of the minor triad in "Harmony Explained" requires the concept of an inconsistency arising from a redundant recognizer algorithm.

In this case, one recognizer fires, that of the conjunction of three pairwise intervals of tones, whereas another recognizer does not fire, that if the triple of tones in order. This combination of firings is inconsistent because it is not possible for it to occur by playing any single normal harmonic series on, say, a flute. To generate it, one must play multiple notes and then use the effect of the recognizer of intervals pairing up tones from across the notes.

That is, this is a new kind of auditory perception that can be created as an artifact of the auditory recognizer algorithms of the brain, but cannot be heard otherwise. This is harmony.

If this this was taught to you at Berklee, please tell me which course that was and what the textbook is so I can look it up in the course syllabus and table of contents.