Toward a Cultural Theory of Consonance

Lundin, Robert W.

doi:10.1080/00223980.1947.9917318

Cited by 33 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…It has also seemed plausible that consonance might not be rooted in acoustics at all, and is instead the arbitrary product of enculturation [23] -listeners might simply learn to like specific chords that are prevalent in the music of their culture. This notion is fueled in part by the use of the equal-tempered scale in modern music, in which consonant intervals only approximate integer ratios (Fig.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences reveal the basis of consonance.

McDermott

Oxenham

2010

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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SummarySome combinations of musical notes are consonant (pleasant), while others are dissonant (unpleasant), a distinction central to music. Explanations of consonance in terms of acoustics, auditory neuroscience, and enculturation have been debated for centuries [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. We utilized individual differences to distinguish the candidate theories. We measured preferences for musical chords as well as nonmusical sounds that isolated particular acoustic factors -specifically, the beating and the harmonic relationships between frequency components, two factors that have long been thought to potentially underlie consonance [2,3,10,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Listeners preferred stimuli without beats and with harmonic spectra, but across over 250 subjects, only the preference for harmonic spectra was consistently correlated with preferences for consonant over dissonant chords. Harmonicity preferences were also correlated with the number of years subjects had spent playing a musical instrument, suggesting that exposure to music amplifies preferences for harmonic frequencies because of their musical importance. Harmonic spectra are prominent features of natural sounds, and our results indicate they also underlie the perception of consonance. ResultsFig . 1a shows the pleasantness ratings given by a group of subjects to different combinations of notes. Some combinations were consistently rated higher than others, irrespective of the instrument playing the notes. This is the phenomenon of consonance, the origins of which have remained controversial throughout history [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].Ancient thinkers viewed consonance as determined by ratios (Fig. 1b), but in modern times it has been linked to acoustic properties thought to be important to the auditory system [10]. The dominant contemporary theory posits that dissonance is due to beating between frequency components [2,[13][14][15]. Beating occurs whenever two sinusoids of differing frequency are combined (Fig. 1c, top left). Over time the components drift in and out of phase, and the combined waveform waxes and wanes in amplitude. This modulation produces a sound quality known as roughness that listeners typically describe as unpleasant [21,22], and that has been thought to be prevalent in dissonant, but not consonant, musical chords [13][14][15]. Fig. 1c shows spectra and waveforms for two musical intervals (chords with two notes). The minor second, a dissonant interval, contains many pairs of frequency components that are close but not identical in frequency, and that produce beating, visible as amplitude fluctuations in

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences reveal the basis of consonance.

McDermott

Oxenham

2010

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…As Lundin (1947) In Experiment 2, each triad was allocated a different position in the short sequence IV-V-I in both major and minor keys (major and minor triads appeared only in sequences in major or minor keys respectively). The appearance of an augmented or diminished chord is expected in certain progressions, since both chords have certain "expected" harmonic functions.…”

Section: Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is thought that the perception of C/D depends not just on the sensory features of chords, but also on the musical context in which the interval or chord is presented. If this is the case, then factors such as: the principles of tonality; the musical context in which the chord appears; the listener's musical schema; the listener's familiarity with the style of music; and the music's acoustic properties may all play a part in shaping C/D perception (Cazden, 1980;Gardner & Pickford, 1943;Krumhansl, 1990;Lundin, 1947;Terhardt, 1984). Gardner and Pickford (1943,1944) conducted a study to demonstrate the influence of musical context, in which they employed various chords (details not given) in different contexts and keys as musical stimuli.…”

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confidence: 99%

On the fluidity of consonance and dissonance: The influence of musical context.

Arthurs¹,

Timmers²

2016

Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain

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The consonance/dissonance (C/D) level of a triadic chord is not a fixed or absolute value.Rather, it is fluid, since C/D depends both on a chord's sonic characteristics and on the musical context in which it appears. To test the fluidity of C/D -the extent to which C/D perception is dependent on musical context -four types of chords, major, minor, augmented and diminished triads, were presented in isolation ("without musical context") and as part of a short cadence (IV-V-I, "with musical context"). The C/D level of each chord was judged, as was the overall C/D and pleasantness/unpleasantness (P/U) level of the cadences. When isolated, major triads were considered most consonant, followed by minor and diminished triads, while augmented triads were judged most dissonant. In the context of a musical cadence, this rank order remained the same, but augmented and diminished chords were evaluated as less or more dissonant depending on their functional position within the cadence (for instance, diminished triads were relatively consonant when on the subdominant, while augmented triads were relatively dissonant when on the tonic). These findings lend support to the hypotheses that: (a) the degree to which the harmonic function of a chord is familiar, and; (b) the degree to which a chord's stability (and hence also the listener's expectation) is violated contribute to the perception of C/D.

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“…Second, cultural (Cazden, 1980;Fritz et al, 2009;Lundin, 1947;Vassilakis, 2005) and music-theoretical (Krumhansl, 1990) norms restrict the prevalence of inharmonic intervals within most tonal music repertoires (Huron, 1994), making dissonant moments unexpected and bewildering relative to their consonant counterparts (Costa, Bitti, & Bonfiglioli, 2000). This bewildering quality of dissonant music might further contribute to the information complexity of dissonant intervals, producing cognitive demands on the listener that consonant, harmonic music does not.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inharmonic music elicits more negative affect and interferes more with a concurrent cognitive task than does harmonic music

Bonin

Smilek

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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We evaluated whether task-irrelevant inharmonic music produces greater interference with cognitive performance than task-irrelevant harm onic music. Participants completed either an auditory (Experiment 1) or a visual (Experiment 2) version of the cognitively demanding 2-back task in which they were required to categorize each digit in a sequence of digits as either being a target (a digit also presented two positions earlier in the sequence) or a distractor (all other items). They were concurrently exposed to either task-irrelevant harmonic music (judged to be consonant), task-irrelevant inharmonic music (judged to be dissonant), or no music at all as a distraction. The main finding across both experiments was that performance on the 2-back task was worse when participants were exposed to inharmonic music than when they were exposed to harmonic music. Interestingly, performance on the 2-back task was generally the same regardless of whether harmonic music or no music was played. We suggest that inharmonic, dissonant music interferes with cognitive performance by requiring greater cognitive processing than harmonic, consonant music, and speculate about why this might be.

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Toward a Cultural Theory of Consonance

Cited by 33 publications

References 15 publications

Individual differences reveal the basis of consonance.

Individual differences reveal the basis of consonance.

On the fluidity of consonance and dissonance: The influence of musical context.

Inharmonic music elicits more negative affect and interferes more with a concurrent cognitive task than does harmonic music

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