Timbral effects on consonance illuminate psychoacoustics of music evolution

Abstract

The phenomenon of musical 'consonance' is crucial for many musical styles, determining how notes are organized into scales, how scales are tuned, and how chords are constructed from scales. Western music theory assumes that consonance depends solely on frequency ratios between chord tones; however, psychoacoustic theories predict a dependency also on the 'timbre' (tone color) of the underlying sounds. We investigate this possibility with 24 large-scale behavioral experiments (4,666 participants), constructing detailed continuous maps of consonance judgments for different timbres, and simulating these judgments with representative computational models. We find that timbral manipulations can indeed modify consonance judgments, transforming both the magnitude and the location of consonance peaks. We show how these results shed new light into the mechanisms underlying consonance perception as well as the cultural evolution of scale systems. More broadly, this work showcases how large-scale behavioral experiments can inform classical questions in auditory perception.

Geometry of Music Perception

“…In particular, he suggests that some aspects of music theory can be transferred to compressed and stretched spectra, when played in compressed and stretched scales. This has been confirmed by recent results [9].…”

“…They extend their ideas to introduce a new model for the analysis and generation of voice leadings [8]. Marjieh et al [9] provide a detailed analysis of the relationship between consonance and timbre. A speculative account on the evolutional aspect of consonance has been discussed in [10] with the conclusion that understanding evolutionary aspects require elaborate cross-cultural and cross-species studies.…”

The sound of manufactured music: Reviewing the role of artificial stimuli in music cognition research.

“…This review covers three subareas—music preference, music learning, and musical emotion—which were chosen for several reasons. First, these three areas have garnered considerable scholarly attention within music cognition, both in past decades and very recently (Loui, 2022; Marjieh et al, 2022; Ornoy, 2022), reflecting their importance in the field. Second, as described above, these areas are heavily represented in research on the closely related topic of cross-cultural music.…”

Geometry of Music Perception

“…They extend their ideas to introduce a new model for the analysis and generation of voice-leadings [36]. Marjieh et al [65] provide a detailed analysis of the relationship between consonance and timbre. A speculative account on the evolutional aspect of consonance has been discussed in [35] with the conclusion that understanding evolutionary aspects require elaborate cross-cultural and cross-species studies.…”