Comments on "A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales"

On 03 December 2009, PLoS ONE published an enlightening new study [Gill2009] which attempts to provide a biological rationale for musical scales that are used across various cultures. The gist of its conclusions is

... the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest overall spectral similarity to a harmonic series.

However, an initial cursory look suggests that this conclusion doesn't hold for many of the राग्s commonly employed in हिंदूस्तानी music. I submitted my initial opinion and other observations as comments on the paper [Kamath2009].

This post is a broader treatment based on those original comments.