Musical chords are combinations of two or more tones played together. While many different chords are used in music, some are heard as more attractive (consonant) than others. We have previously suggested that, for reasons of biological advantage, human tonal preferences can be understood in terms of the spectral similarity of tone combinations to harmonic human vocalizations. Using the chromat...

Different accounts have been given in order to face the problem of the emergence of musical consonance and dissonance. Getting a more adequate comprehension of such phenomenology may require a systemic view to integrate such multidimensionality into a unitary picture in which every partial solution enlightens a particular aspect of the very same problem. Such a systemic viewpoint shifts the foc...

Children’s purchase influence (CPI) is an important factor in understanding family consumption behavior. The present study investigated the effects of cultural adaptation, including the role of acculturation and ethnicidentification, on children’s role in family purchase decisions. By conceiving of CPI as a family context-dependent phenomenon, we hypothesized that parent–child cultural dissonan...

In music there are several terms permanently used, whose meaning changed in time, depending on the historical moment or cultural space; among them, consonance and dissonance, diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic. Tonality appeared during baroque era and was finalized by J.S. Bach. After that, it grew up in the music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt – for about 150 years. At the end of ...

The preferences of 2and 4-month-old infants for consonant versus dissonant two-tone intervals was tested by using a looking-time preference procedure. Infants of both ages preferred to listen to consonant over dissonant intervals and found it difficult to recover interest after a sequence of dissonant trials. Thus, sensitivity to consonance and dissonance is found before knowledge of scale stru...

We report on experiments in which musically relevant harmonic and inharmonic sounds have been fed into computer-based ear models (or into modules which at least simulate parts of the peripheral auditory system) working either in the frequency or in the time domain. For a major chord in just intonation, all algorithms produced reliable and interpretable output, which explains mechanisms of pitch...

firstly, theories are reviewed on the explanation of tonal consonance as the singular nature of tone intervals with frequency ratios corresponding with small integer numbers. An evaluation of these explanations in the light of some experimental studies supports the hypothesis, as promoted by von Helmholtz, that the difference between consonant and dissonant intervals is related to beats of adja...