ArticlePsychological review2020
Simultaneous consonance in music perception and composition.
Article in Psychological review, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Structure of Musical Dislikes: Findings From Multiple Genres and Countries.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Embodied Responses to Harmony and (Poly)Rhythm: An Integrated Ratio-Based Perception-Action Framework.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Consonance Shapes the Multisensory and Emotional Mappings of Musical Intervals Across English- and Mandarin-Speakers.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Electrophysiological and behavioural responses to consonant and dissonant piano chords as standardised affective stimuli.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Mistuning perception in music is asymmetric and relies on both beats and inharmonicity.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Musical anhedonia, timbre, and the rewards of music listening.Cognition · 2024Article
- Development of tonality and consonance categorization ability and preferences in 4- to 6-year-old children.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Increasing the complexity of isolated musical chords benefits concurrent associative memory formation.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Musicians and non-musicians show different preference profiles for single chords of varying harmonic complexity.PloS one · 2023Article
- Article
- Culture influences conscious appraisal of, but not automatic aversion to, acoustically rough musical intervals.PloS one · 2023Article
- Roughness perception: A multisensory/crossmodal perspective.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2022Review
- Register impacts perceptual consonance through roughness and sharpness.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music.PloS one · 2022Article
- Is Harmonicity a Misnomer for Cultural Familiarity in Consonance Preferences?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Harmonicity and Roughness in the Biology of Tonal Aesthetics.Music perception · 2021Article
- Cultural familiarity and musical expertise impact the pleasantness of consonance/dissonance but not its perceived tension.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Simultaneous consonance is a salient perceptual phenomenon corresponding to the perceived pleasantness of simultaneously sounding musical tones. Various competing theories of consonance have been proposed over the centuries, but recently a consensus has developed that simultaneous consonance is primarily driven by harmonicity perception. Here we question this view, substantiating our argument by critically reviewing historic consonance research from a broad variety of disciplines, reanalyzing consonance perception data from 4 previous behavioral studies representing more than 500 participants, and modeling three Western musical corpora representing more than 100,000 compositions. We conclude that simultaneous consonance is a composite phenomenon that derives in large part from three phenomena: interference, periodicity/harmonicity, and cultural familiarity. We formalize this conclusion with a computational model that predicts a musical chord's simultaneous consonance from these three features, and release this model in an open-source R package, incon, alongside 15 other computational models also evaluated in this paper. We hope that this package will facilitate further psychological and musicological research into simultaneous consonance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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