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


Journal

Nature communications
ISSN: 2041-1723
Titre abrégé: Nat Commun
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101528555

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
19 Feb 2024
Historique:
received: 15 12 2022
accepted: 11 12 2023
medline: 19 2 2024
pubmed: 19 2 2024
entrez: 18 2 2024
Statut: epublish

Résumé

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.

Identifiants

pubmed: 38369535
doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45812-z
pii: 10.1038/s41467-024-45812-z
doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

IM

Pagination

1482

Informations de copyright

© 2024. The Author(s).

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Auteurs

Raja Marjieh (R)

Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. raja.marjieh@princeton.edu.
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. raja.marjieh@princeton.edu.

Peter M C Harrison (PMC)

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. pmch2@cam.ac.uk.
Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. pmch2@cam.ac.uk.

Harin Lee (H)

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.

Fotini Deligiannaki (F)

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute for AI Safety and Security, Bonn, Germany.

Nori Jacoby (N)

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. nori.jacoby@ae.mpg.de.

Classifications MeSH