It’s a cliche to say that the harmonic series is the basis of all of music. It is true that the first five harmonics are the basis of Western tuning. The first seven harmonics are a possible basis for the blues. You don’t tend to hear much music based on the higher harmonics, but they can be a great way to build exotic scales that still have a feeling of coherence and order.
Here are some tracks I made using the pitch ratios derived from the first forty-three natural harmonics.
I made this music using Ableton Live and a tuning plugin called MTS-ESP. I got it so I could try out historical tuning systems, first for my own understanding, and then for teaching music theory. While I was experimenting with the software, I started plugging in weird scales of my own invention. To understand what I was doing, you need to know a little math.