How electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos created new scales, by doing away with the assumption that there must be an octave:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuT6Y53LYH4&list=RDRuT6Y53LYH4&start_radio=1
You can hear these scales in "Beauty in the Beast":
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2j1gy2
if it sounds eerie and alien it's because these are notes your ears have literally never heard before. What if a painter could invent new colors?
Where else could we apply this idea of questioning what we assume to be the neutral background of our work?