A psychophysical study of the perception of consonance and dissonance

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess how the qualities of consonance and dissonance are perceived. The participants first completed a pretest, in which they compared consonant and dissonant intervals with a standard interval. Then they completed a pair-comparison procedure, in which they made judgments of a series of pairs of intervals in terms of which interval sounded “better.” The members of a pair were both consonant or both dissonant, or one was consonant and one was dissonant. Participants who had consistently identified intervals appropriately as either consonant or dissonant in the pretest perceived the consonant intervals as more or less equivalent. However, they perceived the dissonant intervals in terms of a dimension, with some such intervals being judged consistently as “better” than others. The order of subjects’ preferences among dissonant intervals corresponded roughly, although not precisely, to the theoretical order described in some musicology literature and to the order generated by psychological judgments of music experts. © 1981, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.