Why dissonant music strikes the wrong chord in the brain

http://www.nature.com/news/why-dissonant-music-strikes-the-wrong-chord-in-the-brain-1.11791

by ananyob • 14 years ago

34 18 14 years ago

praptak• 14 years ago

This is a bit disappointing. If I understand correctly they only gathered some evidence that it is not due to beating (interference.) So we still don't even know whether it's prewired or learned. The fact that you can learn to like dissonance tells us little - you can also learn to like some kinds of bitter taste and dislike for bitter is prewired.

ananyob2• 14 years ago

That's underselling it a bit, I think? They've ruled out the dominant hypothesis with their experiment (beating/roughness) and propose another - harmony of overtones. Quite clever to do the experiment with people with amusia. Wonder if this has anything to say about the old CD versus vinyl debate? Or was that nonsense anyway?

pygy_• 14 years ago

The beating/roughness couldn't have explained the dissonance of the tritone (C to F# for example).

The harmony of overtones doesn't come as a surprise for people familiar with sound synthesis, but I suppose that it had never been rigorously tested...

dietrichepp• 14 years ago

> “Rock bands often deliberately introduce roughness and dissonance into their sounds, much to the delight of their audiences”, she says.

From reading this, you might think that this trick was invented in the mid-20th century.

microtherion3• 14 years ago

Besides, rock tends to be harmonically quite conservative, compared to classical music and jazz.

The reason something like the intro to Jimi Hendrix' "Purple Haze" stands out is that tritones are very much the exception rather the rule in rock.

jtheory2• 14 years ago

Hmph. Read through to the end, and even the paper's co-author agrees nothing was really proven, and learning is quite likely still a major factor in what we prefer to hear.

There's also no discussion of cultures whose traditional music focuses on creating audible beating, like gamelan. There's a ton of audible beating, it's completely intentional and part of the sound, and even if you've grown up listening to music with a lower normal level of dissonance the sound can grow on you.

It's also worth mentioning that highly consonant music is pretty lifeless -- even in the world of western music, the drive and power of a piece comes in tension and release.

ananyob2• 14 years ago

He doesn't say nothing was really proven - he just says that they didn't establish whether this dislike of dissonance was innate or not. That wasn't what the experiment was about. It was to find what caused the dislike - and they ruled out 'beating' and propose it's harmonicity. It's also not beating per se which people find unpleasant but rapid beating -roughness. Does Gamelan try to produce 'roughness'-ie rapid beating - or just beating - which I could imagine would be quite cool.

jtheory2• 14 years ago

Fair enough, and I shouldn't just knock it without even reading carefully. It's frustrating sometimes to see discussions like these that seem to completely ignore the very wide variety of sounds that people find pleasant. I've perhaps read too many claims that "music is a universal language" when it far from that.

You should search out some recordings; I played in a gamelan ensemble for a while and quite enjoyed it. The sound is cool, and the interlocking rhythms do neat things in your head. :)

The beats -- I'm not sure if they're rapid enough to qualify as "roughness" or not; I've never encountered that term before, but they're fairly rapid and give a shimmering effect.

gjm11• 14 years ago

I think the hypothesis described here is pretty much refuted by the work of William Sethares (http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/), who finds that severely non-harmonic intervals can sound just fine when played with (synthetic) instruments whose overtones are suitably non-harmonic, and that using such instruments can make nice harmonic intervals sound just as nasty as severely non-harmonic ones do on conventional instruments with harmonic spectra.

There's a slightly convincing example at http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/mp3s/challoct.mp3 -- what you hear there is two successive sequences of (note A, note B, chord A+B) where B is an octave above A in the first case and about 1.07 octaves -- an octave and 0.8 of a semitone -- in the second. The instrument has a weird spectrum that makes the second A+B sound better than the first -- but it's weird enough that, to me at least, even the individual notes sound really odd.

A better example: http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/%7Esethares/mp3s/tenfingersX.mp... is a piece in "10-tone equal temperament", in which notoriously almost all chords sound dreadful with normal instruments. http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/mp3s/Ten_Fingers.mp3 is the exact same notes, but played on an instrument with a spectrum designed not to sound horrible in 10-tet.

enqk• 14 years ago

Norman D. Cook has some very nice papers about harmony and tri-chords that make the case that intervals are not what matters when it comes to characterizing more complex harmonies:

http://www.res.kutc.kansai-u.ac.jp/~cook/

sp332• 14 years ago

This short video is a fascinating explanation of how sound interacts with our ears, and why chords sound good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_0DXxNeaQ0

colanderman• 14 years ago

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.

followed by:

Co-author Josh McDermott at New York University reported previously that harmonicity seems more important than beating for dissonance aversion in normal hearers. In the new paper he and his colleagues argue that the lack of sensitivity both to harmonicity and dissonance in amusics now adds to that case.

Am I thick? These paragraphs seem to directly contradict each other (1st says amusics are sensitive to dissonance, 2nd says they are not).

microtherion3• 14 years ago

beating != dissonance.

rodelrod• 14 years ago

I'm surprised at the lack of understanding of the music phenomenon surfacing in this article. Is this the current state of cognitive psychology?

Complex mathematical relations in harmonics induce more tension than simple ones. We've known this at least since Pythagoras. Schoenberg knew this perfectly well -- he published the bible for the theory of tonal harmony -- and never argued against it, as is claimed in this article. What he did claim was that our ears gradually grow used to the common dissonances which start to lose the tension potential and to be heard as "colors" [EDIT: hence one of his first atonal works, "Farben"]. This is what he calls the "emancipation of dissonance". Basically, we have to find the "edge" in more and more complex mathematical relations.

[EDIT: further, he thought this race for complexity was doomed and exhausted and we should let fully emancipated dissonance live a life of its own, not trying to build up and release tension; this opened a wealth of musical possibilities while alienating a good part of the audience]

Pure major chords sound more "pleasant" in a pepsi-challenge type of study. So does pure sugar in a taste study. That doesn't mean the perfect meal is a pile of sugar cubes.

backbonejstutes• 14 years ago

Great comment!

stephengillie• 14 years ago

This is a topic which should be covered by audiologists, not cognitive psychologists. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's some previous literature about this topic.

Where is the discussion on the physics of audio, the chords harmonically generated by instruments, and their effects within the ear? These aren't just chords which "sound unpleasant", there's an actual physical way to describe this.

Is this study just more scientific noise?

jberryman• 14 years ago

Just wanted to add: Schoenberg's historical view of western music was one of a sort of slow "climb" up the overtone series, from early music utilizing almost exclusively perfect harmonies, to modern (in the west) compositions that use quarter tones, etc.

> Pure major chords sound more "pleasant" in a pepsi-challenge type of study. So does pure sugar in a taste study. That doesn't mean the perfect meal is a pile of sugar cubes.

Love this.

microtherion3• 14 years ago

One example of this "climb" is Wagner, who was found to be excessively dissonant by many contemporary listeners. Nowadays, I think even listeners with very conservative tastes in music don't consider Wagner all that dissonant.

Why dissonant music strikes the wrong chord in the brain

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