Consonance is continuous tone flow while dissonance is intermittent roughness

Evidence

The individual pulses of tone in a dissonant combination give us certainly the same impression of separate pulses at slow beats, although we are unable to recognize them separately and count them; hence they form a tangled mass of tone, which cannot be analyzed into its constituents. Because of the unpleasantness of dissonance we attribute to this roughness and entanglement. The meaning of this distinction may be briefly stated: consonance is a continuous, dissonance and intermittent sensation of tone. Two consonant tones flow on quietly side-by-side in an undisturbed stream; dissonant tones cut one another up into separate pulses of tone. This description of the distinction at which we have arrived agrees precisely with Euclid’s old definition, “Consonance is a blending of a higher tone with a lower tone. Dissonance is the incapacity to mix, when two tones cannot blend, but appear rough to the ear.” — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 2345

Categorization

• DEFINE: The clarity of defining consonance as continuous versus dissonance as intermittent sensation, and its match with Euclid’s ancient definition.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s earlier soundscape work on signal versus noise and figure-ground distinctions in auditory perception. — connects to: Consonance and dissonance judgments stem from critical bandwidth mechanics — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 934
• DEEPTHINKING: A definitional pair that collapses centuries of music theory into perceptual continuity versus intermittence, aligning with ancient Greek definitions.