Quarter-tones & Harmony

This is really the culmination of it all; I dug all this up in order to know if using quarter-tones was inherently wrong. And the more I went on, the clearer it became to me: there is nothing for or against anything in this department. "This could indeed be the wrong address", I said to myself! Why, then, was everybody blaming quarter-tones for our music lack of harmony? What was stopping us from at least trying? On the surface of it, it could be because:

Primo, Harmony is historically (i.e., conditionally) linked to the Occident.
Secundo, C-Eb-G does admittedly sound odd, thus discordant, to most people.
But the cognoscenti would be keen to add that, Tertio, Carl E. Seashore, the Music Psychology pioneer of the 1930's, did in fact establish a set of mathematical and physical ratios common among what the music people would regard as pleasant.

But that was because Music Psychology started by assuming that musicians knew best about music; after all, it is their very life! Later on, though, studies grew more probing, and started asking nagging questions like "Why would musicians believe such and such sound is pleasant, in the first place?" Currently, nobody can talk anymore about music as if it had anything hardwired into it. We now know for sure that, as far as our reaction to music is concerned, everything depends on Habit & Familiarity. That our good old past experiences govern our perceptions. That sane people do hear things; our mind always perceiving what it thinks is there, even if it is not (nobody complains about the clash that happens to exist even in the most familiar of chords: C-E-G brings out, B [from E] and D [from G] as second, and fifth partials above the fundamental in the harmonic series, and then G# [from E] and B [from G] as fourth partials)! And, finally, that anything, everything, changes with time. So, I might be a sane person, after all!!

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