When musical notes are combined to make a chord, the closeness of fit of the combined spectrum to a single harmonic series (the 'harmonicity' of the chord) predicts the perceived consonance (how pleasant and stable the chord sounds; McDermott, Lehr, & Oxenham, 2010). The distinction between consonance and dissonance is central to Western musical form. Harmonicity is represented in the temporal ...

Sensory consonance and dissonance are perceptual attributes of musical intervals conveying pleasantness, tension, and harmony in musical phrases. For complex-tone dyads, corresponding to two musical notes played simultaneously, consonance is known to vary with the ratio in fundamental frequency (F0) between the two tones in the dyad. While such a relationship is well established for dyads, the ...

The position of intervals and the degree of musical consonance can be objectively explained by temporal series formed by mixing two pure sounds covering an octave. This result is achieved by means of Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA) without considering neither overtones nor physiological hypotheses. The obtained prediction of a consonance can be considered a novel solution to Galileo’s ...

I discuss three fundamental questions underpinning the study of consonance: 1) What features cause a particular chord to be perceived as consonant? 2) How did humans evolve ability perceive these features? 3) Why attribute aesthetic valences (if they at all)? The first question has been addressed by several recent articles, including Friedman, Kowalewski, Vuvan, and Neill (2021), with common co...

Some combinations of musical tones sound pleasing to Western listeners, and are termed consonant, while others sound discordant, and are termed dissonant. The perceptual phenomenon of consonance has been traced to the acoustic property of harmonicity. It has been repeatedly shown that neural correlates of consonance can be found as early as the auditory brainstem as reflected in the harmonicity...

The practice of harmonic mixing is a technique used by DJs for the beat-synchronous and harmonic alignment of two or more pieces of music. In this paper, we present a new harmonic mixing method based on psychoacoustic principles. Unlike existing commercial DJ-mixing software, which determines compatible matches between songs via key estimation and harmonic relationships in the circle of fifths,...

Some combinations of musical notes sound pleasing and are termed "consonant," but others sound unpleasant and are termed "dissonant." The distinction between consonance and dissonance plays a central role in Western music, and its origins have posed one of the oldest and most debated problems in perception. In modern times, dissonance has been widely believed to be the product of "beating": int...

After the generation of a sample of musical compositions, the rules which gave birth to these groups of compositions have been codified into a genetic code and these families, which had the capability of adapting to the environment and to reproduce themselves have been selected. The fitness the authors were in search for was about musical consonance. In this paper we present some results which ...