Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical stability

Abstract

We provide evidence that the roughness of chords—a psychoacoustic property resulting from unresolved frequency components—is associated with perceived musical stability (operationalized as finishedness) in participants with differing levels and types of exposure to Western or Western-like music. Three groups of participants were tested in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and two groups in Sydney, Australia (musicians and non-musicians). Unlike prominent prior studies of consonance/dissonance across cultures, we framed the concept of consonance as stability rather than as pleasantness. We find a negative relationship between roughness and musical stability in every group including the PNG community with minimal experience of musical harmony. The effect of roughness is stronger for the Sydney participants, particularly musicians. We find an effect of harmonicity—a psychoacoustic property resulting from chords having a spectral structure resembling a single pitched tone (such as produced by human vowel sounds)—only in the Sydney musician group, which indicates this feature’s effect is mediated via a culture-dependent mechanism. In sum, these results underline the importance of both universal and cultural mechanisms in music cognition, and they suggest powerful implications for understanding the origin of pitch structures in Western tonal music as well as on possibilities for new musical forms that align with humans’ perceptual and cognitive biases. They also highlight the importance of how consonance/dissonance is operationalized and explained to participants—particularly those with minimal prior exposure to musical harmony.

The perception of tension in harmonic intervals across Indian and Western listeners: The roles of psychoacoustics and musical expertise

“…These results across both Indian and Western musicians and non-musicians decidedly imply a different mode of response according to musical expertise rather than a cultural difference between India and the West (cf. [14]); the current study's Indian musicians' interval tension profile is largely similar to ratings obtained from Western musicians [18], including the notable tension peak of the augmented fourth (tritone). Accordingly, in both cultures non-musicians are evidently hard-pressed to discriminate tension levels in harmonic intervals -at least on a verbal rating scale.…”

“…As a reference, it is helpful to measure the obtained tension ratings against a comparable Western dataset [18], where altogether 79 participants (19 musicians and 60 non-musicians) from Sydney, Australia, rated the stability of intervals (played with the from a Western point of view culturally familiar timbres of vocals and strings and then collapsed for analysis) with the concept of relative 'finishedness' which is taken as the inverse of tension. Although the rating scale was binary, a similar analysis using generalised (binomial) mixed-model analysis was applied to these two Western groups to compare differences between and within the groups across the 12 intervals.…”

“…It is important to note here that Indian classical music indeed has a tonal syntax and a vertical plane of pitch simultaneity (melody tones being heard against a tonic drone) and hence asking about perceived tension in harmonic intervals has a well-motivated rationale; in non-Western cultures where this is not explicitly clear or if the target culture does not use harmonic intervals (cf. [18]) the use of the concept of tension or tonal stability may well be a somewhat uninformed and ethnocentric choice. For example, the Kalash/Khow tribes residing in the remote valleys between Northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan with minimal exposure to Western music do not use the word 'tension' to describe harmonic motion despite having polyphonic elements in their musical cultures (G.…”

“…As the data of Maher [14] is now almost half a century old and was conducted on a participant pool consisting exclusively of North Indian non-musicians without expertise in Indian classical music, the aim of the current study is to compare the results of Maher [14] to data obtained from a contemporary Indian participant pool consisting of both musicians and non-musicians and to juxtapose these with the general pattern found in how interval tension is perceived in the Western population (see e.g., [18]).…”

“…The perception of harmonic consonance/dissonance (hereafter referred to as C/D) has received a great amount of scholarly attention with regard to how it is perceived by Western listeners (for data-based overviews, see [6,7]), but the debate on how much of it is due to an innate and hence universal cognitive disposition versus a result of enculturation is still ongoing (see positions by e.g., [8,9,10]). Cross-cultural research (see [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]) has not yet been able to conclusively resolve this question one way or the other due to conflicting evidence arising from e.g., differing methodologies, research protocols, concepts, and levels of Westernisation in target cultures.…”