ArticleScientific reports2020
Cultural familiarity and musical expertise impact the pleasantness of consonance/dissonance but not its perceived tension.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- A tradeoff between musical tension perception and declarative memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Trial
- Consonance Shapes the Multisensory and Emotional Mappings of Musical Intervals Across English- and Mandarin-Speakers.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- This sounds important: Electrophysiological responses reveal a dedicated learning mechanism to process salient consonant sounds in human newborns.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Music and awe: complex emotions evoked by tonal dissonance.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- How Familiarity, Musical Affinity, and ADHD Shape Adolescents' Perception of Musical Emotions.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Musical neurodynamics.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
- 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
- Evaluating the Influence of Musical and Monetary Rewards on Decision Making through Computational Modelling.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Modelling individual aesthetic judgements over time.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Neuromagnetic representation of musical roundness in chord progressions.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- When sounds come alive: animacy in the auditory sense.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Increasing the complexity of isolated musical chords benefits concurrent associative memory formation.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Consonance Perception in Congenital Amusia: Behavioral and Brain Responses to Harmonicity and Beating Cues.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- Culture influences conscious appraisal of, but not automatic aversion to, acoustically rough musical intervals.PloS one · 2023Article
- Article
- Register impacts perceptual consonance through roughness and sharpness.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Is Harmonicity a Misnomer for Cultural Familiarity in Consonance Preferences?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The contrast between consonance and dissonance is vital in making music emotionally meaningful. Consonance typically denotes perceived agreeableness and stability, while dissonance disagreeableness and a need of resolution. This study addresses the perception of consonance/dissonance in single intervals and chords with two empirical experiments conducted online. Experiment 1 explored the perception of a representative sample of intervals and chords to investigate the overlap between the seven most used concepts (Consonance, Smoothness, Purity, Harmoniousness, Tension, Pleasantness, Preference) denoting consonance/dissonance in all the available (60) empirical studies published since 1883. The results show that the concepts exhibit high correlations, albeit these are somewhat lower for non-musicians compared to musicians. In Experiment 2 the stimuli's cultural familiarity was divided into three levels, and the correlations between the key concepts of Consonance, Tension, Harmoniousness, Pleasantness, and Preference were further examined. Cultural familiarity affected the correlations drastically across both musicians and non-musicians, but in different ways. Tension maintained relatively high correlations with Consonance across musical expertise and cultural familiarity levels, making it a useful concept for studies addressing both musicians and non-musicians. On the basis of the results a control for cultural familiarity and musical expertise is recommended for all studies investigating consonance/dissonance perception.
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