Sweetness is in the ear of the beholder: chord preference across United Kingdom and Pakistani listeners

Abstract

The majority of research in the field of music perception has been conducted with Western participants, and it has remained unclear which aspects of music perception are culture dependent, and which are universal. The current study compared how participants unfamiliar with Western music (people from the Khowar and Kalash tribes native to Northwest Pakistan with minimal exposure to Western music) perceive affect (positive versus negative) in musical chords compared with United Kingdom (UK) listeners, as well as the overall preference for these chords. The stimuli consisted of four distinct chord types (major, minor, augmented, and chromatic) and were played as both vertical blocks (pitches presented concurrently) and arpeggios (pitches presented successively). The results suggest that the Western listener major-positive minor-negative affective distinction is opposite for Northwest Pakistani listeners, arguably because of the reversed prevalence of these chords in the two music cultures. The aversion to the harsh dissonance of the chromatic cluster is present cross-culturally, but the preference for the consonance of the major triad varies between UK and Northwest Pakistani listeners, depending on cultural familiarity. Our findings imply not only notable cultural variation but also commonalities in chord perception across Western and non-Western listeners.

Is Harmonicity a Misnomer for Cultural Familiarity in Consonance Preferences?

“…An interesting case-in-point here is the history of the major third interval which is highly harmonic but became consonant only over time in Western music (see Hindemith, 1942;Tenney, 1988), familiarity (through frequency of occurrence) evidently driving its perceived consonance instead of an inherent acoustic 'harmonicity' effect. This latter observation is in line with cross-cultural research demonstrating a lack of preference for major chords (McDermott et al, 2016;Lahdelma et al, 2021) and major-key chord sequences (Athanasopoulos et al, 2021) in non-Western populations. As this recent cross-cultural research evidence suggests that harmonicity preferences may be restricted to the Western musical culture, it is possible that such preferences are learned both on an individual (Weiss et al, 2020) and on a cultural level (see through exposure.…”

“…Another recent cross-cultural research endeavor comparing the perception of chords across non-Western (two remote Northwest Pakistani tribes with limited exposure to Western music) and Western listeners echoes the findings of McDermott et al (2016). The Northwest Pakistani tribes did not indicate any preference for the consonant major triad but had a clear aversion to the highly dissonant chromatic cluster chord (Lahdelma et al, 2021).…”

“…This preference for harmonicity would arguably arise through exposure to specifically polyphony in a given musical culture (cf. the lack of polyphony and lack of preference for consonance among the Tsimané, see McDermott et al, 2016), although notably Athanasopoulos et al (2021) and Lahdelma et al (2021) did not find a preference for highly harmonic background harmonisations and chords among two remote Pakistani tribes with minimal exposure to Western music who nonetheless do have some polyphony in their own music. We propose that future research should address exactly how and why the seemingly universal perception of fusion becomes associated specifically with positive valence and preference for Western listeners (see also Weiss et al, 2020).…”

“…The question of simultaneous consonance and dissonance-the relative agreeableness/stability vs. disagreeableness/instability of pitch combinations-has received a substantial amount of scholarly attention recently (see e.g., Friedman et al, 2021;Harrison, 2021;Lahdelma et al, 2021). A consensus has been emerging in recent years that the Western notion of consonance/dissonance (C/D) is a combination of the acoustic phenomena of roughness and harmonicity, and the cultural effect of familiarity (see e.g., Harrison and Pearce, 2020).…”

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Influence of Timbre on Affect Perception in Western Classical Music and Chinese Music Traditions

“…The cue-redundancy model was proposed based on the relationship between music and emotion in cross-cultural research (Balkwill and Thompson, 1999). Many cross-cultural studies have confirmed that participants were sensitive to the intended emotion aroused by unfamiliar music through attending to psychophysical cues (Argstatter, 2015;Cowen et al, 2020) such as tempo and rhythm (Balkwill et al, 2004;Fritz et al, 2009;Zacharopoulou and Kyriakidou, 2009;Laukka et al, 2013;Midya et al, 2019), complexity (Balkwill et al, 2004), harmonic dissonance (Athanasopoulos et al, 2021;Lahdelma et al, 2021), and tonality (Laukka et al, 2013;Egermann et al, 2015;Raman and Dowling, 2017;Midya et al, 2019). Timbre is one of the psychophysical cues that has a great impact on affect perception in crosscultural research, although not much research has been conducted on this.…”