Cultural familiarity and musical expertise impact the pleasantness of consonance/dissonance but not its perceived tension

Consonance in the carillon

Previous psychological studies have shown that musical consonance is not only determined by the frequency ratios between tones, but also by the frequency spectra of those tones. However, these prior studies used artificial tones, specifically tones built from a small number of pure tones, which do not match the acoustic complexity of real musical instruments. The present experiment therefore investigates tones recorded from a real musical instrument, the Westerkerk Carillon, conducting a "dense rating" experiment where participants (N = 113) rated musical intervals drawn from the continuous range 0-15 semitones. Results show that the traditional consonances of the major third and the minor sixth become dissonances in the carillon and that small intervals (in particular 0.5-2.5 semitones) also become particularly dissonant. Computational modelling shows that these effects are primarily caused by interference between partials (e.g., beating), but that preference for harmonicity is also necessary to produce an accurate overall account of participants' preferences. The results support musicians' writings about the carillon and contribute to ongoing debates about the psychological mechanisms underpinning consonance perception, in particular disputing the recent claim that interference is largely irrelevant to consonance perception.

Neuromagnetic representation of musical roundness in chord progressions

Introduction

Musical roundness perception relies on consonance/dissonance within a rule-based harmonic context, but also on individual characteristics of the listener. The present work tackles these aspects in a combined psychoacoustic and neurophysiological study, taking into account participant's musical aptitude.

Methods

Our paradigm employed cadence-like four-chord progressions, based on Western music theory. Chord progressions comprised naturalistic and artificial sounds; moreover, their single chords varied regarding consonance/dissonance and harmonic function. Thirty participants listened to the chord progressions while their cortical activity was measured with magnetoencephalography; afterwards, they rated the individual chord progressions with respect to their perceived roundness.

Results

Roundness ratings differed according to the degree of dissonance in the dominant chord at the progression's third position; this effect was pronounced in listeners with high musical aptitude. Interestingly, a corresponding pattern occurred in the neuromagnetic N1m response to the fourth chord (i.e., at the progression's resolution), again with somewhat stronger differentiation among musical listeners. The N1m magnitude seemed to increase during chord progressions that were considered particularly round, with the maximum difference after the final chord; here, however, the musical aptitude effect just missed significance.

Discussion

The roundness of chord progressions is reflected in participant's psychoacoustic ratings and in their transient cortical activity, with stronger differentiation among listeners with high musical aptitude. The concept of roundness might help to reframe consonance/dissonance to a more holistic, gestalt-like understanding that covers chord relations in Western music.

Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales

The phenomenon of musical consonance is an essential feature in diverse musical styles. The traditional belief, supported by centuries of Western music theory and psychological studies, is that consonance derives from simple (harmonic) frequency ratios between tones and is insensitive to timbre. Here we show through five large-scale behavioral studies, comprising 235,440 human judgments from US and South Korean populations, that harmonic consonance preferences can be reshaped by timbral manipulations, even as far as to induce preferences for inharmonic intervals. We show how such effects may suggest perceptual origins for diverse scale systems ranging from the gamelan's slendro scale to the tuning of Western mean-tone and equal-tempered scales. Through computational modeling we show that these timbral manipulations dissociate competing psychoacoustic mechanisms underlying consonance, and we derive an updated computational model combining liking of harmonicity, disliking of fast beats (roughness), and liking of slow beats. Altogether, this work showcases how large-scale behavioral experiments can inform classical questions in auditory perception.

Evaluating the Influence of Musical and Monetary Rewards on Decision Making through Computational Modelling

A central question in behavioural neuroscience is how different rewards modulate learning. While the role of monetary rewards is well-studied in decision-making research, the influence of abstract rewards like music remains poorly understood. This study investigated the dissociable effects of these two reward types on decision making. Forty participants completed two decision-making tasks, each characterised by probabilistic associations between stimuli and rewards, with probabilities changing over time to reflect environmental volatility. In each task, choices were reinforced either by monetary outcomes (win/lose) or by the endings of musical melodies (consonant/dissonant). We applied the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter, a validated hierarchical Bayesian framework, to model learning under these two conditions. Bayesian statistics provided evidence for similar learning patterns across both reward types, suggesting individuals' similar adaptability. However, within the musical task, individual preferences for consonance over dissonance explained some aspects of learning. Specifically, correlation analyses indicated that participants more tolerant of dissonance behaved more stochastically in their belief-to-response mappings and were less likely to choose the response associated with the current prediction for a consonant ending, driven by higher volatility estimates. By contrast, participants averse to dissonance showed increased tonic volatility, leading to larger updates in reward tendency beliefs.

Modelling individual aesthetic judgements over time

Listening to music, watching a sunset-many sensory experiences are valuable to us, to a degree that differs significantly between individuals, and within an individual over time. We have theorized (Brielmann & Dayan 2022 Psychol. Rev. 129, 1319-1337 (doi:10.1037/rev0000337))) that these idiosyncratic values derive from the task of using experiences to tune the sensory-cognitive system to current and likely future input. We tested the theory using participants' (n = 59) ratings of a set of dog images (n = 55) created using the NeuralCrossbreed morphing algorithm. A full realization of our model that uses feature representations extracted from image-recognizing deep neural nets (e.g. VGG-16) is able to capture liking judgements on a trial-by-trial basis (median r = 0.65), outperforming predictions based on population averages (median r = 0.01). Furthermore, the model's learning component allows it to explain image sequence dependent rating changes, capturing on average 17% more variance in the ratings for the true trial order than for simulated random trial orders. This validation of our theory is the first step towards a comprehensive treatment of individual differences in evaluation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.

TenseMusic: An automatic prediction model for musical tension

The perception of tension and release dynamics constitutes one of the essential aspects of music listening. However, modeling musical tension to predict perception of listeners has been a challenge to researchers. Seminal work demonstrated that tension is reported consistently by listeners and can be accurately predicted from a discrete set of musical features, combining them into a weighted sum of slopes reflecting their combined dynamics over time. However, previous modeling approaches lack an automatic pipeline for feature extraction that would make them widely accessible to researchers in the field. Here, we present TenseMusic: an open-source automatic predictive tension model that operates with a musical audio as the only input. Using state-of-the-art music information retrieval (MIR) methods, it automatically extracts a set of six features (i.e., loudness, pitch height, tonal tension, roughness, tempo, and onset frequency) to use as predictors for musical tension. The algorithm was optimized using Lasso regression to best predict behavioral tension ratings collected on 38 Western classical musical pieces. Its performance was then tested by assessing the correlation between the predicted tension and unseen continuous behavioral tension ratings yielding large mean correlations between ratings and predictions approximating r = .60 across all pieces. We hope that providing the research community with this well-validated open-source tool for predicting musical tension will motivate further work in music cognition and contribute to elucidate the neural and cognitive correlates of tension dynamics for various musical genres and cultures.

Culture influences conscious appraisal of, but not automatic aversion to, acoustically rough musical intervals

There is debate whether the foundations of consonance and dissonance are rooted in culture or in psychoacoustics. In order to disentangle the contribution of culture and psychoacoustics, we considered automatic responses to the perfect fifth and the major second (flattened by 25 cents) intervals alongside conscious evaluations of the same intervals across two cultures and two levels of musical expertise. Four groups of participants completed the tasks: expert performers of Lithuanian Sutartinės, English speaking musicians in Western diatonic genres, Lithuanian non-musicians and English-speaking non-musicians. Sutartinės singers were chosen as this style of singing is an example of 'beat diaphony' where intervals of parts form predominantly rough sonorities and audible beats. There was no difference in automatic responses to intervals, suggesting that an aversion to acoustically rough intervals is not governed by cultural familiarity but may have a physical basis in how the human auditory system works. However, conscious evaluations resulted in group differences with Sutartinės singers rating both the flattened major as more positive than did other groups. The results are discussed in the context of recent developments in consonance and dissonance research.

Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical stability

We provide evidence that the roughness of chords-a psychoacoustic property resulting from unresolved frequency components-is associated with perceived musical stability (operationalized as finishedness) in participants with differing levels and types of exposure to Western or Western-like music. Three groups of participants were tested in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and two groups in Sydney, Australia (musicians and non-musicians). Unlike prominent prior studies of consonance/dissonance across cultures, we framed the concept of consonance as stability rather than as pleasantness. We find a negative relationship between roughness and musical stability in every group including the PNG community with minimal experience of musical harmony. The effect of roughness is stronger for the Sydney participants, particularly musicians. We find an effect of harmonicity-a psychoacoustic property resulting from chords having a spectral structure resembling a single pitched tone (such as produced by human vowel sounds)-only in the Sydney musician group, which indicates this feature's effect is mediated via a culture-dependent mechanism. In sum, these results underline the importance of both universal and cultural mechanisms in music cognition, and they suggest powerful implications for understanding the origin of pitch structures in Western tonal music as well as on possibilities for new musical forms that align with humans' perceptual and cognitive biases. They also highlight the importance of how consonance/dissonance is operationalized and explained to participants-particularly those with minimal prior exposure to musical harmony.

Increasing the complexity of isolated musical chords benefits concurrent associative memory formation

The effects of background music on learning and memory are inconsistent, partially due to the intrinsic complexity and diversity of music, as well as variability in music perception and preference. By stripping down musical harmony to its building blocks, namely discrete chords, we explored their effects on memory formation of unfamiliar word-image associations. Chords, defined as two or more simultaneously played notes, differ in the number of tones and inter-tone intervals, yielding varying degrees of harmonic complexity, which translate into a continuum of consonance to dissonance percepts. In the current study, participants heard four different types of musical chords (major, minor, medium complex, and high complex chords) while they learned new word-image pairs of a foreign language. One day later, their memory for the word-image pairs was tested, along with a chord rating session, in which they were required to assess the musical chords in terms of perceived valence, tension, and the extent to which the chords grabbed their attention. We found that musical chords containing dissonant elements were associated with higher memory performance for the word-image pairs compared with consonant chords. Moreover, tension positively mediated the relationship between roughness (a key feature of complexity) and memory, while valence negatively mediated this relationship. The reported findings are discussed in light of the effects that basic musical features have on tension and attention, in turn affecting cognitive processes of associative learning.

Consonance and dissonance perception. A critical review of the historical sources, multidisciplinary findings, and main hypotheses

Revealed more than two millennia ago by Pythagoras, consonance and dissonance (C/D) are foundational concepts in music theory, perception, and aesthetics. The search for the biological, acoustical, and cultural factors that affect C/D perception has resulted in descriptive accounts inspired by arithmetic, musicological, psychoacoustical or neurobiological frameworks without reaching a consensus. Here, we review the key historical sources and modern multidisciplinary findings on C/D and integrate them into three main hypotheses: the vocal similarity hypothesis (VSH), the psychocultural hypothesis (PH), and the sensorimotor hypothesis (SH). By illustrating the hypotheses-related findings, we highlight their major conceptual, methodological, and terminological shortcomings. Trying to provide a unitary framework for C/D understanding, we put together multidisciplinary research on human and animal vocalizations, which converges to suggest that auditory roughness is associated with distress/danger and, therefore, elicits defensive behavioral reactions and neural responses that indicate aversion. We therefore stress the primacy of vocality and roughness as key factors in the explanation of C/D phenomenon, and we explore the (neuro)biological underpinnings of the attraction-aversion mechanisms that are triggered by C/D stimuli. Based on the reviewed evidence, while the aversive nature of dissonance appears as solidly rooted in the multidisciplinary findings, the attractive nature of consonance remains a somewhat speculative claim that needs further investigation. Finally, we outline future directions for empirical research in C/D, especially regarding cross-modal and cross-cultural approaches.

A tradeoff between musical tension perception and declarative memory

Successful formation of long-term declarative memory is influenced, among other things, by attention, emotion, and deviation from expectations. A unique form of expectation can be elicited through musical tension, evoked by the prolongation of certain musical progressions. We examined the effect that musical tension exerts on the formation of declarative memory, by composing three original music pieces that contained tension segments, achieved by delays in release from dominant to tonic harmonies. Music-evoked tension was validated using music information retrieval (MIR) analysis, as well as skin conductance response (SCR) measures. Indeed, tension-evoking musical excerpts were associated with heightened SCR, corroborated by increased subjective ratings of tension, as compared to neutral excerpts. In the main experiment, 50 participants listened to the three musical pieces while they were presented with unique images that were randomly assigned to four conditions: tension, tension-release, neutral music, and silence. One day later, their memory for the images was examined using a recognition test. We found that memory performance was enhanced for images presented during both neutral and tense music compared to silence. Moreover, we observed a tradeoff effect between post-experiment tension perception and memory, such that individuals who perceived musical tension as such displayed reduced memory performance for images encoded during musical tension, whereas tense music benefited memory for those with lower musical tension perception. Understanding the interrelations between musical components, which exert powerful and fundamental responses in humans, and cognitive faculties, may provide insights as to the basic features of memory formation.

Register impacts perceptual consonance through roughness and sharpness

The perception of consonance and dissonance in intervals and chords is influenced by psychoacoustic and cultural factors. Past research has provided conflicting observations about the role of frequency in assessing musical consonance that may stem from comparisons of limited frequency bands without much theorizing or modeling. Here we examine the effect of register on perceptual consonance of chords. Based on two acoustic principles, we predict a decrease in consonance at low frequencies (roughness) and a decrease of consonance at high frequencies (sharpness). Due to these two separate principles, we hypothesize that frequency will have a curvilinear impact on consonance. A selection of tetrads varying in consonance were presented in seven registers spanning 30 to 2600 Hz. Fifty-five participants rated the stimuli in an online experiment. The effect of register on consonance ratings was clear and largely according to the predictions; The low registers impacted consonance negatively and the highest two registers also received significantly lower consonance ratings than the middle registers. The impact of register on consonance could be accurately described with a cubic relationship. Overall, the influence of roughness was more pronounced on consonance ratings than sharpness. Together, these findings clarify previous empirical efforts to model the effect of frequency on consonance through basic acoustic principles. They further suggest that a credible account of consonance and dissonance in music needs to incorporate register.

Sweetness is in the ear of the beholder: chord preference across United Kingdom and Pakistani listeners

The majority of research in the field of music perception has been conducted with Western participants, and it has remained unclear which aspects of music perception are culture dependent, and which are universal. The current study compared how participants unfamiliar with Western music (people from the Khowar and Kalash tribes native to Northwest Pakistan with minimal exposure to Western music) perceive affect (positive versus negative) in musical chords compared with United Kingdom (UK) listeners, as well as the overall preference for these chords. The stimuli consisted of four distinct chord types (major, minor, augmented, and chromatic) and were played as both vertical blocks (pitches presented concurrently) and arpeggios (pitches presented successively). The results suggest that the Western listener major-positive minor-negative affective distinction is opposite for Northwest Pakistani listeners, arguably because of the reversed prevalence of these chords in the two music cultures. The aversion to the harsh dissonance of the chromatic cluster is present cross-culturally, but the preference for the consonance of the major triad varies between UK and Northwest Pakistani listeners, depending on cultural familiarity. Our findings imply not only notable cultural variation but also commonalities in chord perception across Western and non-Western listeners.

Automatic responses to musical intervals: Contrasts in acoustic roughness predict affective priming in Western listeners

The aim of the present study is to determine which acoustic components of harmonic consonance and dissonance influence automatic responses in a simple cognitive task. In a series of affective priming experiments, eight pairs of musical intervals were used to measure the influence of acoustic roughness and harmonicity on response times in a word-classification task conducted online. Interval pairs that contrasted in roughness induced a greater degree of affective priming than pairs that did not contrast in terms of their roughness. Contrasts in harmonicity did not induce affective priming. A follow-up experiment used detuned intervals to create higher levels of roughness contrasts. However, the detuning did not lead to any further increase in the size of the priming effect. More detailed analysis suggests that the presence of priming in intervals is binary: in the negative primes that create congruency effects the intervals' fundamentals and overtones coincide within the same equivalent rectangular bandwidth (i.e., the minor and major seconds). Intervals that fall outside this equivalent rectangular bandwidth do not elicit priming effects, regardless of their dissonance or negative affect. The results are discussed in the context of recent developments in consonance/dissonance research and vocal similarity.

Memorisation and implicit perceptual learning are enhanced for preferred musical intervals and chords

Is it true that we learn better what we like? Current neuroaesthetic and neurocomputational models of aesthetic appreciation postulate the existence of a correlation between aesthetic appreciation and learning. However, even though aesthetic appreciation has been associated with attentional enhancements, systematic evidence demonstrating its influence on learning processes is still lacking. Here, in two experiments, we investigated the relationship between aesthetic preferences for consonance versus dissonance and the memorisation of musical intervals and chords. In Experiment 1, 60 participants were first asked to memorise and evaluate arpeggiated triad chords (memorisation phase), then, following a distraction task, chords’ memorisation accuracy was measured (recognition phase). Memorisation resulted to be significantly enhanced for subjectively preferred as compared with non-preferred chords. To explore the possible neural mechanisms underlying these results, we performed an EEG study, directed to investigate implicit perceptual learning dynamics (Experiment 2). Through an auditory mismatch detection paradigm, electrophysiological responses to standard/deviant intervals were recorded, while participants were asked to evaluate the beauty of the intervals. We found a significant trial-by-trial correlation between subjective aesthetic judgements and single trial amplitude fluctuations of the ERP attention-related N1 component. Moreover, implicit perceptual learning, expressed by larger mismatch detection responses, was enhanced for more appreciated intervals. Altogether, our results showed the existence of a relationship between aesthetic appreciation and implicit learning dynamics as well as higher-order learning processes, such as memorisation. This finding might suggest possible future applications in different research domains such as teaching and rehabilitation of memory and attentional deficits.

Evaluative judgment across domains: Liking balance, contour, symmetry and complexity in melodies and visual designs

Evaluative judgment-i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked-is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain's sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.

Harmonic organisation conveys both universal and culture-specific cues for emotional expression in music

Previous research conducted on the cross-cultural perception of music and its emotional content has established that emotions can be communicated across cultures at least on a rudimentary level. Here, we report a cross-cultural study with participants originating from two tribes in northwest Pakistan (Khow and Kalash) and the United Kingdom, with both groups being naïve to the music of the other respective culture. We explored how participants assessed emotional connotations of various Western and non-Western harmonisation styles, and whether cultural familiarity with a harmonic idiom such as major and minor mode would consistently relate to emotion communication. The results indicate that Western concepts of harmony are not relevant for participants unexposed to Western music when other emotional cues (tempo, pitch height, articulation, timbre) are kept relatively constant. At the same time, harmonic style alone has the ability to colour the emotional expression in music if it taps the appropriate cultural connotations. The preference for one harmonisation style over another, including the major-happy/minor-sad distinction, is influenced by culture. Finally, our findings suggest that although differences emerge across different harmonisation styles, acoustic roughness influences the expression of emotion in similar ways across cultures; preference for consonance however seems to be dependent on cultural familiarity.