Individual Differences Reveal the Basis of Consonance

SummarySome combinations of musical notes are consonant (pleasant), whereas 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 and 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 and 20]. Listeners preferred stimuli without beats and with harmonic spectra, but across more than 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 that they also underlie the perception of consonance.

► Sounds with harmonic frequencies, and that lack beats, are preferred by listeners
► Only preference for harmonic spectra predicts preference for consonant chords
► Preferences for harmonic spectra, consonant chords correlate with musical experience
► Suggests harmonic frequency relations underlie perception of consonance