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

Abstract

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.

Cross-Modal Perception of Noise-in-Music: Audiences Generate Spiky Shapes in Response to Auditory Roughness in a Novel Electroacoustic Concert Setting

“…It is only when auditory roughness is high that perhaps attention is focused on the rough stimulus, in turn mapping on to spiky visual shapes. Such an interpretation would be consistent with Bonin and Smilek (2016) findings on the automatic cognitive interference effect of auditory roughness (from inharmonic chords) in attentional and memory tasks. Interestingly, even though numerous previous studies have shown that higher pitches are typically paired with sharper shapes (e.g., Boyle and Tarte, 1980 ; Marks, 1987 ; Walker et al, 2010 ; Shang and Styles, 2017 ), in the current study, the roughness characteristics of noise predicted of shape design more strongly than the acoustic feature of pitch.…”

Anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex response to systematically controlled tonal dissonance during passive music listening

“…Although researchers had initially found the ACC engaged only during conflict between response representations (Milham et al, 2001;Nelson, Reuter-Lorenz, Sylvester, Jonides, & Smith, 2003;van Veen et al, 2001), which suggested that the ACC could be selectively triggered by such conflicts; successive studies have shown that the ACC can also be engaged during conflicts between other types of semantic and conceptual representations (Badre & Wagner, 2004;van Veen & Carter, 2005;Weissman, Giesbrecht, Song, Mangun, & Woldorff, 2003). Music cognition research has suggested that low tonalness sequences could be inherently conflict-demanding due to their tendency towards equivocal referential tonal centers (Bonin & Smilek, 2016;Huron, 2008;Johnson-Laird, Kang, & Chang, 2012;Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982;Parncutt, 1989Parncutt, , 2011Temperley, 2010), which in turn has been associated with the listeners' experience of increased musical tension (Bigand et al, 1996;Bigand & Parncutt, 1999;Blood et al, 1999;Bravo, Cross, Hawkins, et al, 2017;Lerdahl & Krumhansl, 2007;Schellenberg & Trehub, 1994;Temperley, 2010). We therefore believe that the enhanced activation of the rostral ACC (when comparing dissonant against consonant sequences) could also be explained in terms of conflict monitoring processes.…”

Preferred music listening does not affect cognitive inhibition in young and older adults.

“…Second, harmonic structure of music may influence cognitive inhibition. Bonin and Smilek (2016) showed that dissonant music elicits greater interferences while completing a cognitive task than harmonic music. As listed in Table 1, tempo, energy, danceability, loudness, valence, and acoustic features of preferred music may influence performance in cognitive tasks (Johansson et al, 2012).…”