Simultaneous consonance in music perception and composition.

Abstract

Simultaneous consonance is a salient perceptual phenomenon corresponding to the perceived pleasantness of simultaneously sounding musical tones. Various competing theories of consonance have been proposed over the centuries, but recently a consensus has developed that simultaneous consonance is primarily driven by harmonicity perception. Here we question this view, substantiating our argument by critically reviewing historic consonance research from a broad variety of disciplines, reanalyzing consonance perception data from 4 previous behavioral studies representing more than 500 participants, and modeling three Western musical corpora representing more than 100,000 compositions. We conclude that simultaneous consonance is a composite phenomenon that derives in large part from three phenomena: interference, periodicity/harmonicity, and cultural familiarity. We formalize this conclusion with a computational model that predicts a musical chord’s simultaneous consonance from these three features, and release this model in an open-source R package, incon, alongside 15 other computational models also evaluated in this paper. We hope that this package will facilitate further psychological and musicological research into simultaneous consonance.

Musical Expertise Facilitates Dissonance Detection On Behavioral, Not On Early Sensory Level

“…We shall use the terms sensory consonance and sensory dissonance to refer to the natural components, and, when necessary, musical consonance and musical dissonance to refer to consonance/dissonance in the musical context, which is strongly linked to music cultures and affected by the individual's musical expertise and musical preferences (cf. McDermott et al, 2016;Terhardt, 1984; but see Bidelman, 2013;Bowling et al, 2017;Harrison & Pearce, 2020;Kuusi, 2001;Lahdelma & Eerola, 2016;Parncutt & Hair, 2011;Virtala & Tervaniemi, 2017). Musical consonance/dissonance is inclusive of sensory consonance/dissonance, and we acknowledge that no strict demarcation might be necessary (or even possible) between sensory and musical consonance/dissonance, nor between natural and cultural components of perception and judgment of consonance/dissonance.…”

“…To bridge the gap between physical, physiological, psychological, and cultural aspects of consonance/dissonance studies, Parncutt and Hair (2011) proposed a holistic ''conceptual structure for Western consonance/dissonance.'' According to them, the consonance/dissonance of individual harmonic structures (as opposed to successive ones) has ''two natural components, smoothness and harmonicity (fusion)'' and ''the cultural component,'' that is, familiarity with music one is exposed to, as well as speech and sounds of the environment (see also Harrison & Pearce, 2020;Parncutt & Hair, 2018). Smoothness, roughness, and harmonicity are considered ''natural components'' because of ''their apparent perceptual universality'': ''they influence the everyday auditory experience of every hearing human'' and other animals (Parncutt & Hair, 2011; see also Rehding, 2019).…”

Cultural familiarity and musical expertise impact the pleasantness of consonance/dissonance but not its perceived tension

“…refs. 2,37 ). Roughness denotes the sound quality that arises from the beating of frequency components (e.g.…”

Automatic Responses to Acoustically Rough Intervals: Evidence from a Word Evaluation task

“…Indeed, the harmonicity properties of the human voice have proved the basis for a compelling explanation of consonance (Bowling and Purves, 2015) if consonance and dissonance are treated as two distinct phenomena (i.e. consonance as the perceptual correlate of harmonicity, and dissonance as the perceptual correlate of roughness) instead of a continuous scale (see also Harrison and Pearce, 2020;Parncutt and Hair, 2011). As a corollary to this, we contend that the capacity to violate norms surrounding harmonicity, both in producing and attending to rough sounds, for instance cries of infants (Koutseff et al, Armitage et al, Automatic Responses to Rough Intervals 2018) or angry voices (Bänziger et al, 2015), also confers an evolutionary advantage.…”