Abstract
Sensory consonance and dissonance are perceptual attributes of musical intervals conveying pleasant-
ness, tension, and harmony in musical phrases. For complex-tone dyads, corresponding to two musical
notes played simultaneously, consonance is known to vary with the ratio in fundamental frequency
(F0) between the two tones in the dyad. While such a relationship is well established for dyads, the
subjective consonance of chords containing three or more simultaneous notes, that form the basis
of most musical pieces, remains to be explored. The present study aimed at comparing consonance
judgments for dyads and 3-note chords as a function of the F0 ratio between their element tones.
Dyads and chords were generated by adding two or three complex tones containing 6 harmonics with
equal amplitude and random phase. The base F0 of the first tone was randomly selected from an
interval spanning
3
=
4
of a semitone centered at 440 Hz. The second tone F0 varied between 0–12
semitones above the base F0. For chords, the third tone F0 was fixed either at 5 (Perfect 4th, P4) or
at 7 (Perfect 5th, P5) semitones above the base F0. Ten normal-hearing listeners were presented with
all possible dyad/dyad, dyad/chord, and chord/chord combinations in random order and were asked
to judge which interval was most consonant in each paired comparison. The results for dyad/dyad
comparisons were consistent with earlier findings, with the unison, octave, P5, and P4 intervals being
perceived as the most consonant. For dyad/chord comparisons, dyads were more consonant in the
intervals around the fixed third tone. Overall, chords were not found to be more dissonant than
dyads. This suggests that the hypothesis according to which consonance decreases with the amount
of interaction between present harmonics, arguing for a potential role of frequency selectivity for
consonance perception of dyads, might not hold for chords
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of Forum Acusticum |
Number of pages | 4 |
Publication date | 2014 |
Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Event | 7th Forum Acusticum - Krakow, Poland Duration: 7 Sept 2014 → 12 Sept 2014 |
Conference
Conference | 7th Forum Acusticum |
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Country/Territory | Poland |
City | Krakow |
Period | 07/09/2014 → 12/09/2014 |