Western tonal music for centuries has regarded major and minor, as well as chord inversions, as significantly different. They generate indeed completely different physical objects. Ignoring the physical reality of sound is an obvious limitation of atonal theory. However, the defense has been made that theory was not created to fill a vacuum in which existing theories inadequately explained tonal music. Rather, Forte's theory is used to explain atonal music, where the composer has invented a system where the distinction between {0, 4, 7} (called 'major' in tonal theory) and its inversion {0, 8, 5} (called 'minor' in tonal theory) may not be relevant.