Allow me to chime in here. Apparently the western standard is over-simplified and treated as a de-facto standard (thanks to the colonial legacy). The Hindustani and Carnatic system uses shrutis (as you researched previously. The Arabic middle eastern music system uses quarter tones instead of semi-tones. So while western system may be able to express articulations, it falls way short of the resolution of notes (that being one shortcoming but not the end of it). Beyond that (and at the risk of my post being flagged as spam) there’s an excellent series why western music had never been able to capture the essence of Arabic / middle-eastern music. So essentially western standard is widespread but mistaken for universal standard.

https://youtu.be/LR511iAedYU?si=UVOBua6rJ4X50Ds8

• This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by  Shivanand.