> There are no complete scientific theories of music and there never will be, because music is a huge and semi-random collection of cultural experiments and stylistic conventions built only very loosely on perceptual psychology.

You could say much the same thing about architecture. In that domain, I find Christopher Alexander's book A Pattern Language to be a very good reference for describing many concrete reasons why certain buildings feel better than others that seem to be pretty universal. (And we could reasonably expect to be able to test that if we were in doubt.)

It's not a complete theory of architecture and can't be, but partial theories are still tremendously useful and more likely to produce good results than blindly following stylistic rules without knowing what purpose they serve.

I've been hoping for awhile that someone will write a good music theory book in the same format.