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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 Sutartines, English speaking musicians in Western diatonic genres, Lithuanian non-musicians and English-speaking non-musicians. Sutartines 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 Sutartines 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.

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[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0244964.].

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Previous research on harmony perception has mainly been concerned with horizontal aspects of harmony, turning less attention to how listeners perceive psychoacoustic qualities and emotions in single isolated chords. A recent study found mild dissonances to be more preferred than consonances in single chord perception, although the authors did not systematically vary register and consonance in their study; these omissions were explored here. An online empirical experiment was conducted where participants (N = 410) evaluated chords on the dimensions of Valence, Tension, Energy, Consonance, and Preference; 15 different chords were played with piano timbre across two octaves. The results suggest significant differences on all dimensions across chord types, and a strong correlation between perceived dissonance and tension. The register and inversions contributed to the evaluations significantly, nonmusicians distinguishing between triadic inversions similarly to musicians. The mildly dissonant minor ninth, major ninth, and minor seventh chords were rated highest for preference, regardless of musical sophistication. The role of theoretical explanations such as aggregate dyadic consonance, the inverted-U hypothesis, and psychoacoustic roughness, harmonicity, and sharpness will be discussed to account for the preference of mild dissonance over consonance in single chord perception.