Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception

Abstract

by biology remains debated. One widely discussed phenomenon is that some combinations of notes are perceived by Westerners as pleasant, or consonant, whereas others are perceived as unpleasant,or dissonant. The contrast between consonance and dissonance is central to Western music and its origins have fascinated scholars since the ancient Greeks. Aesthetic responses to consonance are commonly assumed by scientists to have biological roots, and thus to be universally present in humans. Ethnomusicologists and composers, in contrast, have argued that consonance is a creation of Western musical culture. The issue has remained unresolved, partly because little is known about the extent of cross-cultural variation in consonance preferences. Here we report experiments with the Tsimane'--a native Amazonian society with minimal exposure to Western culture--and comparison populations in Bolivia and the United States that varied in exposure to Western music. Participants rated the pleasantness of sounds. Despite exhibiting Western-like discrimination abilities and Western-like aesthetic responses to familiar sounds and acoustic roughness, the Tsimane' rated consonant and dissonant chords and vocal harmonies as equally pleasant. By contrast, Bolivian city- and town-dwellers exhibited significant preferences for consonance,albeit to a lesser degree than US residents. The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music, and are thus unlikely to reflect innate biases or exposure to harmonic natural sounds. The observed variation in preferences is presumably determined by exposure to musical harmony, suggesting that culture has a dominant role in shaping aesthetic responses to music.

Musical friends and foes: The social cognition of affiliation and control in improvised interactions

“…Here, we found that the degree of vertical coordination (or the “harmony” of the musicians’ tones and timbres) covaried with the degree of affiliation of the social relations encoded in the interactions: mirrored for high affiliation attitudes (caring, conciliatory) and opposed for low affiliation (disdainful, insolent). That harmonic complementarity could be a cue for social observation in musical situations is particularly interesting in a context where preference for musical consonance was long believed to be very strongly biologically determined (Schellenberg & Trehub, 1996), until recent findings have shown that it is in fact largely culturally-driven (McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga, & Godoy, 2016). …”

Embodied Listening and Timbre

“…An ''angry'' gesture, for instance, has a distinctive timbral profile, including high spectral centroid and a noisy attack, and is typically interpreted accurately by listeners, though this effect varies by instrument. Additionally, the role of timbre in listeners' determination of affect appears to be cross-culturally valid for at least some basic acoustic cues (Balkwill & Thompson, 1999;Fritz et al, 2009;McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga, & Godoy, 2016).…”

Consonance Processing in the Absence of Relevant Experience: Evidence from Nonhuman Animals

“…On the contrary, evidence against this hypothesis could come from experiments showing that species for which harmonic vocalizations play an important role in social behavior lack consonance preferences, or can be trained to prefer dissonance just as easily. In fact, preferences for consonance are affected at least to some degree by exposure to Western harmonic music in humans (McDermott et al, 2016). Thus, comparative experiments with nonhuman animals will certainly offer a more complete picture of this issue.…”

“…Infants paid more attention to the stimuli to which they were preexposed (the familiar stimulus), independent of whether it was consonant or dissonant (Plantinga & Trehub, 2014). A study with members of a native Amazonian society provided additional empirical support to the idea that experience plays a pivotal role in preferences for consonance (McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga, & Godoy, 2016). The authors compared ratings of the pleasantness of sounds between populations from the United States and three populations from Bolivia, including Fritz et al, 2009).…”