Why do people like dissonance

My souncloud ; Personal webpage. Oct, 5. Originally Posted by etkearne. Oct, 6. I understand what you OP are getting at and I have been grappling with this question for many years. I think this thread will get bogged down very soon though, in an argument about definitions of dissonance and atonality. There seems to be no consensus about those terms.

Perhaps we should make sure we limit our comments to our own response to music. For me, I can and do admire some music that would be termed atonal or at least non-harmonic. However I have yet to be deeply moved by any music that does not contain some degree of tonality or harmonic progression be it Monteverdi or Britten. I am a creature of harmony I suppose. Although I consider rhythm to be the most fundamental component music.

Last edited by Petwhac; Oct at Oct, 7. A good question - one that I am actively considering at the moment I do not like this sort of music - I will not write this sort of music. However, I do get some understanding out of it. I agree with the above that it is frequently more primal than common practice music. As to pattern recognition - modern music exploits this more deliberately perhaps than previous sorts, and at a more subconscious level as it appears at least to have less to do with themes at a superficial level than say Mozart.

Perhaps I wrong but that is my impression. However, there is no getting around the fact that to many people it sounds like a random series of noises.

Is this because those listeners have not yet learned to speak the language? Personally I think not - some people do enjoy modern music with no initiation. The concepts of consonance and dissonance are, at both a superficial but also a fundamental level, linked to physics.

Exactly how that connects to our musical experiences we cannot yet explain rigorously but the connection is there, whatever it implies. I don't know enough of these styles of music to be able to take this line of thought any further. Haydn Symphonies threads.

Oct, 8. I can't listen to atonal music and that is because I don't understand it only tried a few times though. I genuinely cannot tell the difference between atonal music and sitting at my piano and randomly playing notes. This is just like some people think abstract paintings can be painted by randomly splashing different colors on canvas. Some can't understand it, and some see an abstract painting and do find its meaning and take pleasure in the process. I love abstract and modern paintings.

The cochlea is a small, coiled tube, and vibrations passed on from the eardrum enter it at one end. If you listen to a single note with a certain frequency, the vibrations will travel into the tube, causing excitement among some of the tiny hairs on its inner surface. Each frequency of vibration is linked to a particular place somewhere along the length of the tube.

The note you hear will have not much effect on the tube in general but will make the hairs dance like crazy in a particular area. Very-high-frequency notes find their dancing hairs just inside the entrance to the tube. Bass notes find theirs down toward the other end—as you can see in this sketch:. This all works very well unless the notes are too close together in frequency. Each frequency excites a little patch of hairs, and if the patches are clearly separated, then the brain can make sense of it all.

If, however, the patches overlap a bit, the brain becomes confused and unhappy. One way of demonstrating this confusion and unhappiness is to use another of your senses—your eyesight.

If the words are printed side by side, though, without any overlap, they become easy to read:. The reason why we should like one but not the other has long vexed both musicians and cognitive scientists. It has often been suggested that humans have innate preferences for consonance over dissonance, leading some to conclude that music in which dissonance features prominently is violating a natural law and is bound to sound bad.

Others, including Schoenberg himself, have argued that dissonance is merely a matter of convention, and that we can learn to love it. However, there has long been thought to be a physiological reason why at least some kinds of dissonance sound jarring. Two tones close in frequency interfere to produce 'beating': what we hear is just a single tone rising and falling in loudness.

If the difference in frequency is within a certain range, rapid beats create a rattling sound called roughness. An aversion to roughness has seemed consistent with the common dislike of intervals such as minor seconds. Yet when Cousineau and colleagues asked amusic subjects to rate the pleasantness of a whole series of intervals, they showed no distinctions between any of the intervals.

In contrast, normal-hearing people rated small intervals minor seconds and major seconds, such as C—D and large but sub-octave intervals minor sevenths C—B flat and major sevenths C—B as very unpleasant. Then the researchers tested how both groups felt about beating. They found that the amusics could hear it and disliked it about as much as the control group.

So apparently something else was causing the latter to dislike the dissonant intervals. Those preferences seem to stem from the so-called harmonicity of consonant intervals.

Notes contain many overtones — frequencies that are whole-number multiples of the basic frequency in the note. The control group preferred consonant intervals with these regular harmonic relationships over artificial 'consonant' ones in which the overtones were subtly shifted to be inharmonic while the basic tones remained the same.

Caption : Brandeis University professor Ricardo Godoy conducts the experiment in a village in the Bolivian rainforest. The participants were asked to rate the pleasantness of various sounds, and Godoy recorded their response. Credits : Photo: Alan Schultz. Caption :. Credits :. A new study out of MIT and Brandis University suggests musical preferences are cultural in origin and not hardwired in the brain.

Consonance and dissonance For centuries, some scientists have hypothesized that the brain is wired to respond favorably to consonant chords such as the fifth so-called because one of the notes is five notes higher than the other. Dramatic differences The researchers did two sets of studies, one in and one in CNN A study co-authored by Prof. Wired UK Taste in music is based on culture and not biology according to a new study by Prof.

Wired A paper co-authored by Prof. The Atlantic Atlantic reporter Ed Young writes about a study by MIT researchers that finds musical preferences may be cultural in origin. Boston Globe A new study co-authored by Prof.

The Washington Post By studying how people from different cultures respond to consonant and dissonant chords, MIT researchers have found that musical tastes may be rooted in cultural origins, not biology, writes Sarah Kaplan for The Washington Post.

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