"I would assume even a non-western scale has to be made up of a note vibrating at a constant freq. That would be the pitch right?"
Yup, but I've never met anybody from another culture with pitch. The point really was that p.p. is not present from birth, but learned. It's just that some people _are_ born with some faculties that make memorizing pitches essentially automatic.
The concept of a 'scale' is very different in some cultures - but that vague statement is about the limit of my ethnomusicology understanding. In middle eastern music, what you might call scales are really more like culturally-standardized jazz riffs. They also use quarter tones - half sharp, half flat, that kind of thing.
Oh yeah, one more question - do all people with pitch use A = 440hz as their standard? Can they calibrate their sense to 442, 438, etc?
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In middle eastern music, what you might call scales are really more like culturally-standardized jazz riffs. They also use quarter tones - half sharp, half flat, that kind of thing.
