Consonance perception is continuous and not tied to musical intervals

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Plomp and Levelt roughness/dissonance data — consonant perception flows from critical bandwidth mechanics rather than culturally learned interval theory. — connects to: Dissonance depends on musical interval, not a fixed beat rate across frequencies; Consonance is a continuous sensation while dissonance is an intermittent one; Western music’s privileged intervals show no perceptual detection advantage (+6 more)
• QUESTION: Since musicians were excluded for bias, how much does musical training actually shift the roughness-to-smoothness boundary that critical bandwidth sets?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 951

Broader Connections

• Pitch’s musical expressiveness may rest on detecting pitch differences, not complex interval patterns #corroborates (0.85)