Running head: EXPOSURE AND PERCEIVED CONSONANCE/DISSONANCE (PREPRINT BY LAHDELMA & EEROLA) 1 Exposure impacts the pleasantness of consonance/dissonance but not its perceived tension Imre Lahdelma1 & Tuomas Eerola1 1 Durham University, UK Author Note Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Imre Lahdelma, Palace Green, DH1 3RL, Durham, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected] EXPOSURE AND PERCEIVED CONSONANCE/DISSONANCE (PREPRINT BY LAHDELMA & EEROLA) 2 Abstract The contrast between consonance and dissonance is a vital factor in making music emotionally meaningful. Consonance typically denotes perceived agreeableness and stability, while dissonance in turn disagreeableness and a need of resolution. The current research addresses the perception of consonance/dissonance in intervals and chords isolated from musical context. Experiment 1 explored the correlations between the seven most used concepts denoting consonance/dissonance across all the available (60) empirical studies published since 1883. The stimuli consisted of a representative continuum of consonance/dissonance. 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 pivotal concepts of Consonance, Tension, Harmoniousness, Pleasantness, and Preference were further examined. 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 familiarity levels. On the basis of the results a rigorous control for familiarity and musical expertise is recommended for all studies investigating the perception of consonance/dissonance. The findings help pinpoint how familiarity affects the perception of consonance/dissonance and demonstrates the pronounced effect of musical expertise on this.1 Keywords: chord, consonance, dissonance, familiarity, interval, musical expertise 1 This is an unpublished preprint that has yet to be peer-reviewed (this version: 2019-12-31). The authors would like to thank James Armitage for feedback and constructive remarks. EXPOSURE AND PERCEIVED CONSONANCE/DISSONANCE (PREPRINT BY LAHDELMA & EEROLA) 3 Exposure impacts the pleasantness of consonance/dissonance but not its perceived tension Introduction The origins of consonance and dissonance have been investigated since the days of Pythagoras in ancient Greece, and its elusive and mercurial nature baffles scholars to this day. The contrast between consonance and dissonance is a crucial feature of Western music, and it plays a vital role in making music emotionally meaningful by providing a sense of variety and motion (see e.g., Meyer, 1956; Parncutt & Hair, 2011). Typically, consonant denotes connotations like harmonious, agreeable, and stable, while dissonant, in turn, connotations like disagreeable, unpleasant, and in need of resolution (Tramo, Cariani, Delgutte, & Braida, 2001). Consonance/dissonance has both a vertical and a horizontal aspect: single isolated intervals (two concurrent pitches) and chords (three or more concurrent pitches) represent vertical consonance/dissonance, while the sequential relationships between these in melodies and chord progressions represent horizontal consonance/dissonance (Parncutt & Hair, 2011). Aesthetic responses to consonance/dissonance (hereafter referred to as C/D and implying exclusively its vertical aspect) are surmised to have both biological and cultural roots, and the debate over which prevails represents a classical nature vs. nurture setting. In addition to disputes over its origins, also the very definition of C/D is notoriously problematic. As Tenney (1988) points out, “there is surely nothing in the language of discourse about music that is more burdened with purely semantic problems than are the terms consonance and dissonance” (p. 1). The concept itself is semantically loaded, and it has been volatile in a historical context as well: certain intervals (e.g., the major and minor thirds) for example became consonant only over time in the framework of Western music (Hindemith, 1942). The inconsistencies arise not only from debates over which acoustic (e.g., roughness, harmonicity, fusion) and cultural phenomena (familiarity and learning both on an individual and on a cultural level, i.e., exposure) and their possible interactions might explain the underlying cause of C/D, but the term itself means different things to different EXPOSURE AND PERCEIVED CONSONANCE/DISSONANCE (PREPRINT BY LAHDELMA & EEROLA) 4 scholars ranging from the most commonly associated definition pleasantness (see e.g., Bones, Hopkins, Krishnan, & Plack, 2014) to concepts like preference (see e.g., Butler & Daston, 1968), smoothness (see e.g., Roberts, 1986), clearness (see Kameoka & Kuriyagawa, 1969), purity (see e.g., Rasmussen, Santurette, & MacDonald, 2014), tension (see e.g., van de Geer, Levelt, & Plomp, 1962), and harmoniousness (see e.g., Cook, 2001). While there have been a couple of attempts to compare the overlap between some of these associated concepts (e.g., Arthurs, Beeston, & Timmers, 2018; van de Geer et al., 1962), it is striking how most scholars do not problematise their definitions of C/D and take them at face value despite clear caveats in previous literature of automatically equating consonance with for example pleasantness (see e.g., Cazden, 1972; Malmberg, 1918) or with preference (see e.g., Parncutt, 2006; Valentine, 1914). Moreover, Ritossa and Rickard (2004) suggest that pleasantness and preference are not directly linked concepts in music perception, yet these have been used as synonyms in C/D research by e.g., Bones et al. (2014), Prete, Fabri, Foschi, Brancucci, and Tommasi (2015), and McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga, and Godoy (2016). The current study aims to explore the overlap between the seven most used concepts (Consonance, Smoothness, Purity, Harmoniousness, Tension, Pleasantness, Preference) denoting C/D perception across all the available (in total 60) research articles published between 1883 and 2019. These studies have produced empirical data on the perception of isolated, simultaneous pitch combinations ranging all the way from intervals (two pitches) to octachords (eight pitches). Related aims include resolving the potential conflict between the most commonly used synonym for C/D, i.e., pleasantness/unpleasantness, and how musical expertise affects this: it has been suggested that the concepts of consonance and pleasantness correlate differently among musicians and non-musicians (see Arthurs et al., 2018; Plomp & Levelt, 1965; Popescu et al., 2019). Moreover, the current study aims to investigate the influence of the total number of pitches present in the stimuli (referred to as numerosity) on the ratings of C/D and related concepts as it has been theorised that numerosity affects the perception of C/D (see Bowling & Purves, 2015). EXPOSURE AND PERCEIVED CONSONANCE/DISSONANCE (PREPRINT BY LAHDELMA & EEROLA) 5 Experiment 1 Methods Experiment 1 is reported as one experiment but is actually a combination of seven separate conditions. In each condition, participants rated the stimuli on one of the seven concepts denoting C/D that have been most used in the previous empirical studies conducted since 1883. The review of past studies was carried out by the current authors and included exclusively those studies that used isolated, vertical pitch combinations (intervals and chords) as the experiment stimuli. Studies using actual music excerpts and chord sequences were excluded from the review as such studies are concerned with the horizontal, not the vertical aspect of C/D (see Parncutt & Hair, 2011). The included studies were found with the aid of Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics, 2019), an online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service. The applied search terms were “consonance dissonance” (326 results), “consonance perception” (322 results), “interval consonance” (183 results), and “chord consonance” (125 results). As Web of Science keeps track of publications only from the year 1900 onwards, studies older than this were searched for manually. The seven most common concepts to denote C/D are 1) Pleasantness (used in 31 studies), 2) Consonance (used in 15 studies), 3) Smoothness (used in 13 studies), 4) Purity (used in five studies), 5) Harmoniousness (used in four studies), 6) Preference (used in three studies), and 7) Tension (used in three studies). Those terms that evidently denote the same perceptual concept (e.g., antonyms like smoothness/roughness) were collapsed under one concept. The majority of these concepts have been used consistently in research during the 20th century and are in use to the present day. All of the concepts have been used to denote the perception of both intervals and chords; the concepts of fusion (used in eight studies), beauty (used in five studies), and euphony (used in five studies) were excluded as they have been used in studies involving exclusively intervals as the experiment stimuli. To minimise the effect of different interpretations of the concepts between participants, each one was EXPOSURE AND PERCEIVED CONSONANCE/DISSONANCE (PREPRINT BY LAHDELMA & EEROLA) 6 explained on the basis of how the concepts are typically defined in previous empirical research or in dictionary entries (see the Appendix). In the explanations, care was taken not to