As you know, we have an innate sense of musicality and we can sense when certain tones are off key and wrong. Im curious to what degree can we sense it? Is there a limit of deviation from the correct pitch where we can’t recognize that the note is off pitch anymore and it starts sounding normal?
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As you said, we’re really, really good at hearing scales. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk) always blows my mind.
As far as scale deviation, it would depend on culture as all humans don’t use the same scales, Asian and Middle Eastern music for example use some wildly different scales than Western Music, that’s part of why music from India (for example) can be so jarring to the Western ear.
I’d say first that it’s less the key or scale, but the “distance” between notes that we hear as an audience. And a songwriter can set an expectation of a key and then play with the distance (called “intervals”) to screw with a listener in fun ways. The song “Smells like Teen Spirit” is a very famous example of a chord progression that deviates, pleasantly, from what the listener “wants” to hear. If you hear that opening chord progression, rock music usually revolves around 4 chords in a pattern, that’s why you can almost always guess the next chord in a song. But in SLTS Cobain breaks that into 2 pairs of chord patterns. The 1st and 2nd are a pair, then he shifts to a “Surprise” 3rd chord but plays the same interval from 3-4 as he does 1-2. That gives the song that “allllmossst” feeling with a bit of anxiety in the listeners ear, Cobain used this trick very, very well.
Finally, you can make “deviations” sound normal by doing a whole key changes midway through a song, sometimes repeatedly. Listen to “Africa” by Toto (or the Weezer cover). That sound actually jumps around through 3 distant scales and keys from verse to chorus and you kind of barely notice it, but it’s just jarring enough to make it a total ear worm.
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