All of it matters, as a lot of what you find enjoyable about music is learned. Today's music might sound dissonant to someone a few hundred ago. Eg. a particular interval the _tritone_, also known as the devil's tone was considered particularly unpleasant before, but is now ubiquitous. Even today you might find music with 12+ tones not enjoyable (try listening to Indian or Middle Eastern scales).
To understand what the physical fundamentals are, think of a taught piece of string that produces a note when you pluck it. The length of it is arbitrary (frequency), what you call this note is arbitrary (letters, sharps, flats etc.). But if you start cutting the string and compare the note it makes to the original, that _ratio_ of strings (frequencies) is a fundamental property of sound and the basis of all music. The simpler the ratio, the more 'pleasant' it will sound when played together, eg. 1-2 is the octave, 2-3 is the fifth. As you can cut the string any number of times, the number of these ratios (the number of notes in a scale) is unlimited, but western music settled on 12 because that number has some nice properties.*Note - 12 tone equal temperament, that allows for the kind of transformations in the article does not exactly match these fundamental ratios. If we were using pure ratios, the distance between any 2 notes in the scale would differ slightly. Meaning you would have to retune a piano if you wanted to play in a different scale.
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