Are some scales more instinctive than others?

Question

Thanks to this answer here, I now know the commonly accepted definition of a scale.

However, from my experience, not all scales feel instinctive. For instance, I think major and minor scales feel more instinctive than chromatic ones. This is actually an interesting distinction because I personally prefer major scales to minor ones, yet I feel they are both very instinctive. I also feel that microtonal scales are less instinctive than chromatic ones.

This answer seems to touch on this a bit. But that particular thread is more about "why seven notes in the major/minor scale?" as opposed to "can we rank scales by how". For instance, if microtonal scales were equally pleasing as the normal major scale, then that answer wouldn't make sense if I understand it correctly. So I think it might be possible to rank scales by how instinctive or natural or pleasing they are. I will use these terms interchangeably unless someone convinces me otherwise.

My Question: What studies have been done to measure the instinctiveness of scales?

I cannot provide a definition of instinctive at the moment, but I would argue the second answer cited in my question has something close to what I am thinking of.

Answer 1

Nurture/nature. I feel that because in the Western world, most of what we listen to is major or minor, over time we've accepted this - it's become 'instinctive'. It would be different if one had listened to, say, Indian music for a long time. Then that would seem 'instinctive'. It's far more nurture than nature, if a loose definition of 'instinctive' is 'natural'. 400, 500 years ago, I doubt whether the stuff we now listen to would have been deemed 'instinctive'.

Answer 2

Back in the early days of Church canon, the third was a decidedly "outside" note. It occurred here and there, but it was by no means afforded the status we give it today. It didn't sound "instinctive."

The only sounds/tones that are "instinctive" are the species danger sounds: those sounds that alert us that something higher than us on the food chain is nearby; those sounds that alert us that large rocks are in motion on the hillside above us; those sounds that alert us that danger is near.

Nothing about the pleasantness or goodness/correctness of musical scales is "instictive." It's all learned. Bifurcated constructs such as consonance/dissonance are learned.

This is one of the major reasons why a "universal" theory of music has not emerged, despite the intense efforts over hundreds of years of a lot of brilliant musicians and philosophers to try to produce one.

Answer 3

Certain interval patterns do turn up in scale repositories more often than others; easy ones are perfect fifths, though as others have pointed out, this may be due to cultural training on what is appropriate, not instinct. A full analysis might start with the scale archive at:

http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/

(though note some of those are constructed or academic scales, so you'd need to filter for the "cultural" ones) and then plot which intervals turn up the most often.