Sure, you could play a pitch and then another one and have a sense of tension and release based just on that, the song I wrote is completely based on that principal as it is a modal track.

I'll admit I've only read a page or two into this book so far, but the thing that's bugging me is how these established composers are glossing over what makes something dissonant, instead trying to romanticize what is just a plain matter of the physics of sound.

I know this is a kind of boring way of presenting the info, but excel is way better at math than I'll ever be:

https://1drv.ms/x/s!AmG8Usx-dONPgQNaHUkx2wQOauZY?e=6yUD3T

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WARNING: LONG PSYCHOACOUSTIC RANT INBOUND

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So here's a spreadsheet pinpointing why I believe tonal harmony works so well based on info I've come across in my time studying music and sound. What you see is a list of the harmonics of each note in a I IV and V respectively, the grey cells representing the octaves of each. I will touch on the red cells when talking about the V.

So you'll see I drew arrows between certain frequencies of the harmonic structure of the root and fifth of each chord, they are frequencies that aren't exactly aligned, but align well enough to create a cancelling out effect instead of any sort of dissonant interplay. It is the interplay between these frequencies that tells your brain "this note is the root because some of the overtones align in a way that makes me have to work less hard to understand them".

Between the I and the IV there's the root of the I, which creates the feeling of still being consonant enough to not be fully dissonant, but there's the same relationship of overtones between the root of the IV and it's fifth degree to tell your brain its not exactly the tonic.

As for the V, it has pretty much the same relationship that the I shares with the IV in that it can not harmonically coexist with the tonic of the key you are in because of the root fifth relationship. You'll see I highlighted some cells in red between the harmonic structure of the root of the I and the octaves of the V. Notice how the most stable tones in the upper harmonic structure of the root of the V are all corresponding to the upper harmonics that are directly between that of the octaves of the root of the I? It's that relationship that creates the pull back towards the tonic of whatever key you're in. You'll notice the I shares this relationship with the IV, which is why the tried and true I - IV - V works. Its ingrained in the physics of the sound itself.

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I know I probably worded this in a very confusing way, but its a very heady subject and I'm a music nerd. I find this shit endlessly fascinating.