Perceived musical dissonance reduces to roughness from beating partials.

Evidence

A clear connection between psychoacoustics and music has been shown. Roughness is closely related to consonance and dissonance perceived between two or more musical notes; the more the partials of the notes generate roughness, the higher the perceived dissonance is. This leads directly to basic melodic and harmonic structures in music. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1350

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s deep-listening and soundscape material — roughness as a carrier of both musical meaning and environmental displeasure. — connects to: Clashing tones within one critical band produce roughness that underlies dissonance; Perceived roughness from beating depends on basilar-membrane critical bands.; Dissonance depends on proportional separation falling inside the critical bandwidth, not absolute frequency difference (+8 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1350

Broader Connections

• Perceived dissonance arises when nearby harmonics fall within critical bandwidth #expands (0.82)
• Perception of two tones progresses from beats to roughness to smoothness #expands (0.78) — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 575
• Sensory consonance depends on roughness, sharpness, and tonalness #expands (0.75) — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 2040