Acoustics & Music Theory
why it sounds like that
Concept

Cross-cultural — where it appears

A claim that holds across musical traditions rather than inside one, and the test a psychoacoustic result has to pass before it is about the ear. It is used here to separate what a listener brings from what a tradition teaches, which is the only way to tell physics from convention.

Named by 2 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Also named here as enculturation — the same set of essays touches all of them, so they are one junction rather than several.

Two models of consonance, and where they disagree. Every chord scored twice: horizontally by summed Plomp–Levelt roughness, vertically by the largest integer needed to write it as members of one harmonic series. Both are supposed to be measuring consonance and both are computed here from the chord itself. They correlate, but not tightly enough to be the same claim, and the chords furthest from the diagonal are the ones any experiment has to be run on.

Consonance is half learned, and this is the half

This site's founding claim is that consonance is small whole numbers. Two computable models say so and they disagree about which chords — which is already awkward. The cross-cultural evidence is worse: listeners with little exposure to Western music discriminate roughness exactly as anyone does, match octaves exactly as anyone does, and rate consonant and dissonant chords as equally pleasant.

perception · Consonance Every result so far, against the listener's own noise. Three findings drawn against the one parameter all of them assume: how finely the listener resolves a pitch. At 11 cents — a trained listener, and the value every earlier essay used — the octave holds 6 nameable categories, twelve equal ones are named right 91 per cent of the time, and a 20-to-one expectation moves a boundary by 3.6 cents. At 35 cents it is 2 categories, 72 per cent, and 37 cents. The capacity falls roughly as one over sigma and the shift rises as its square, so the three curves separate rather than moving together.

The listener the model was never run for

Five earlier essays rest on one number — how finely a listener resolves a pitch — and every one of them used a trained listener's eleven cents. The model's dependence on it is not gentle: the capacity goes as its reciprocal and the expectation shift as its square, so an untrained listener at thirty-five cents has two nameable categories per octave rather than six, and a foreign tuning system is not mis-transcribed by them but absorbed.

scales · Categorical-hearing

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

EnculturationCategorical perceptionCategory boundaryCategory widthConsonanceDifference limenHarmonicityIdentificationMicrotonalityPreferenceRoughness

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