yep - I came in here to talk about "familiarity" as the bedrock of how we listen to tunes. In my estimation, music is a constant juggling act between familiarity and novelty, and bending too much on one side or the other trends towards boredom.

I would argue that some of the pure intonation music (i.e. Michael Harrison's Revelations) or alternate tuning (i.e. Lamonte Young's Well Tuned Piano) is striking initially because of how alien it sounds, but to my ear a lot of it doesn't feel like it does too much more than that both as a function of the tuning and the difficulty in building a moving composition in something so foreign.

The standard tunings in Western Music are well-worn, but they can give a rich vocabulary for dissonance and consonance and have the psychological familiarity to build up emotional abstractions that some of the more adventurous scales do not.