Listen to the sound of a single note played on a good classical guitar. If you have a musical soul, the beautiful singing tone of that single note will move you, and the memory of it will stay with you for hours.

Or how about wind-chimes? They often produce rather unmusical sequences of notes, but many people love the sound they make, regardless.

If you reverse your original statement, however you arrive at something for which you can make a good case: “music is NOTHING without tone”. A simple example: a live band that uses a truly horrible P.A. system that is loud, shrieky, shrill, and ear-stabbing. The band may be good, may be playing well, but nobody is going to enjoy what they hear; they’re too busy sticking their fingers in their ears and looking around for earplugs!

Another example is a lot of those tasteless metal bands that choose to use a tone similar to the sound of wire-brushing rust off a tin roof with a power tool. Normal human ears respond with pain, not pleasure, to this sort of thing. That’s why this sort of music only appeals to a small subset of humanity, metalheads, who have trained their ears to survive the assault. The musicians might be skilled and the lyrics emotional, but the sound is so nasty that most people cannot stand to listen to it.

I agree with you that it is possible to make boring music with great tone (a lot of country music falls into that category!). However it is equally impossible to make beautiful music with horrid tone; you may be able to convey anger or hatred with nasty tone, perhaps, but you won’t succeed in conveying the other emotional colors in the palette of human experience.

-Nemo

But I can see where people might make that assumption, so I’ll make an addendum to my post.

The moral of this comment – there is no “great tone”.

Assuming that there is any particular place where a “great” tone lives/comes from – other than from within your own mind – is starting from a false premise.