Consonance is a continuous sensation while dissonance is an intermittent one

Evidence

Listeners with no musical training were asked to indicate the consonance, or pleasantness, of two sine waves played together. (Musicians were not used in the experiment since they would have preconceived ideas about musical intervals which are con­ sonant.) The result is the continuous pattern of response shown in the fig­ ure, with no particular musical interval being prominent in its degree of perceived consonance. Intervals greater than a minor third were judged to be consonant for all frequency ratios. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 951 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Consonance perception is continuous and not tied to musical intervals — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 951; Untrained listeners judge sine-wave consonance continuously, with no special role for conventional intervals.

Related

• Untrained listeners judge sine-wave consonance continuously, with no special role for conventional intervals. (similarity 0.97)
• Untrained listeners judge two-tone consonance continuously without musical interval prominence (similarity 0.96)
• Consonance perception is continuous and not tied to musical intervals (similarity 0.94)
• Consonance judgments rest on psychoacoustic critical bandwidth (similarity 0.88)
• Consonance is continuous tone flow while dissonance is intermittent roughness (similarity 0.88)
• Dissonance depends on musical interval, not a fixed beat rate across frequencies (similarity 0.88)
• Consonance perception depends on harmonics up to about the seventh (similarity 0.85)
• Simple integer frequency ratios between notes produce the greatest measured consonance (similarity 0.82)
• Chord consonance is computed from individual harmonic proximity across the notes (similarity 0.81)
• Chord dissonance rises as harmonic number increases and interval shrinks (similarity 0.81)
• Simple integer frequency ratios produce local consonance maxima between tones (similarity 0.81)
• The same musical interval’s dissonance changes with pitch register (similarity 0.81)
• The rate of beating between close partials determines whether they sound consonant or rough (similarity 0.80)
• Interval consonance ranking derives from critical-bandwidth proximity between harmonics (similarity 0.80)
• Sensory consonance depends on roughness, sharpness, and tonalness (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Consonance perception is continuous and not tied to musical intervals #corroborates (0.90) — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 951