Dear all,
Please join us for our Cambridge University Music Department Colloquium on Wednesday, 3 November at 17:00 in the Recital Room and online.
We’re excited to hear from Dr. Peter Harrison, the new director of the Centre for Music and Science in Cambridge, who will present a paper titled “Spectral effects on consonance.”
For those wishing to join virtually, you can email [log in to unmask] for the link.
Very best wishes,
Nicky, Tadhg, and Alex
2021-2022 Cambridge Music Colloquium Committee
Abstract
Spectral effects on consonance
The concept of ‘consonance’ is fundamental to Western music, determining how musical tones are combined to form chords. Consonance is typically conceptualized primarily as a function of the frequency ratios between the chord tones’ fundamental frequencies; however, certain psychoacoustic theories of consonance imply that consonance should depend significantly on the upper harmonics of these chord tones. Here we examine this notional relationship in a series of large-scale behavioral experiments. These experiments leverage new methodologies (dense rating, Gibbs Sampling with People) to develop highly detailed continuous maps of listeners’ consonance judgments. We use these paradigms to explore a variety of spectral manipulations, and show that we can produce a series of curious effects, including (a) inducing preferences for inharmonic over harmonic intervals, (b) eliminating certain consonances from listeners’ consonance profiles, and (c) inducing preferences for intervals that deviate slightly from just intonation. We model our results computationally and show that they neatly isolate competing candidate mechanisms of consonance perception, providing evidence for both interference and harmonicity theories while also identifying important phenomena that these theories fail to explain.
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