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- Dissonance refers to the combination of tones that create a sense of tension, instability, or conflict within music. This feeling contrasts with consonance, which provides a sense of resolution and rest.
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Dissonance refers to a combination of tones that creates a sense of tension or clash, often perceived as unstable or unresolved. It plays a crucial role in music by creating emotional depth and contrast, influencing how listeners experience harmony, rhythm, and overall musical structure.
Dissonance is essential for creating musical interest, as it adds complexity and emotional depth to compositions. Different styles of music utilize dissonance in unique ways; for example, jazz often embraces dissonance more freely compared to classical music.
Definition. Dissonances are musical intervals that create a sense of tension or instability, contrasting with consonances, which provide resolution and rest. They are essential in harmony and voice leading, as they drive musical progression and evoke emotional responses.
Jun 7, 2021 · Dissonance in Music Explained: Consonance vs. Dissonance. Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Jun 7, 2021 • 2 min read. If a song makes you feel tense or anxious, dissonance is likely the reason why.
- What Do We Mean by “Consonance” and “Dissonance”?
- Early Models of Consonance and Dissonance
- Context Matters
- Tonotopic Organization of The Ear
- Critical Bands, The Basilar Membrane, and Frequency Selectivity
- Bandwidth and Shape of The Auditory Filter
- “Roughness” and Discrimination
- Complex Tones
- Sonorities of More Than Two Tones
- Top-Down Processing and Its Effect on Dissonance
The terms “consonance” and “dissonance” are antonyms of one another, the formermeaning “sounding together”, while the latter means “not sounding together” or “a lack of consonance.” This circular definition of dissonance makes it difficult to understand what dissonance is on its own terms, outside of its relational context with consonance. The New ...
We can say for sure that these terms imply the presence of more than one sounding object in order to be judged as “sounding together” or “not soundingtogether.” It would seem then that consonance and dissonance might be situatedin the relationship of multiple objects sounding simultaneously, and indeed,this is what Pythagorus proposed. He observed ...
The discussion of intonation and the Pythagorean comma above is our firstclue that modeling consonance and dissonance may not be so simple.If you cannot have both fifths (and by inversion, fourths) and octaves in tune at the same time, we have to ask how far out of tune an interval can be before it transitions from consonant to dissonant,and simila...
In the 19th century, German physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtzformulated Ohm’s acoustic lawwhich states that the human ear perceives musical sound by decomposingit in a manner similar to theFourier transform.Building on the idea that the ear decomposes complex sounds into a sumof simple ones, he went on to explain the relationship betwee...
Around the same time that von Békésy was working in the 1930s,US physicist Harvey Fletcher introduced the notion of the “critical band”, which describes the behavior of the cochlea in terms of a series of overlapping filters (Fletcher, 1940).In the 1960s, Plomp and Levelt showed that “the transition range betweenconsonant and dissonant intervals is...
The frequency resolution of the auditory filter is directly related to the frequency selectivity of the hair cells along the basilar membrane. Extensive psychoacoustical experiments have been conducted in order to measure the bandwidth of the auditory filter, or criticalbandwidth. Based on these measurements, we are able to build a model of the fil...
The picture that is beginning to emerge is that consonance and dissonance are not binary opposites of one another. Rather, as two tones approach each other in frequency, as they enter the criticalband, our perception of them shifts, and we begin to experience them as a single percept with a frequency roughly equal to the average of the twothat has ...
The roughness or smoothness of a complex sonority is dependent to some degreeon the number and configuration of the partials associated with each componentof the sound. Two pure tones whose frequencies reside outside a critical bandwill be perceived as relatively smooth, however, depending on the intervalbetween them, as the number and strength of ...
Up to now, we have been been concerned primarily with dissonance as it relatesto diads, but what about more complex sonorities containing many pitches?Often, a reasonable estimate of the overall roughness of a sonority can be found by simply summing the roughness contained in each band of the auditoryfilter. Using a formula for estimating the rough...
Counterpoint and the Wright-Bregman Hypothesis
As sounds become increasingly separated into different streams (where streams can refer to spatial location in this case), beating diminishes and sound less rough. This explains why binaural beats do not sound as rough as monaural beats. Wright and Bregman propose that certain auditory cues such as stream segregation can prevent the listener from hearing dissonant intervals as such. The figure below is an example taken from Auditory Scene Analysis ; in the top example, although the boxed inte...
Other Factors Contributing to Roughness
In addition to the interaction of two tones within close frequencies, some other factors that contribute to our perception of roughness include spatial location, phase-related fluctuations, and mistuning of consonant intervals. Spatial location: is important because it is a cue for the auditory system to compute the difference between input to the two ears. Although beats can arise monaurally from sounds mixing before they enter the ear, they can also arise neurally when sounds come together...
- Psyche Loui
Consonance and dissonance (C/D) has been central to music theory since ancient Greece. It refers to both vertical and horizontal relationships in the musical score. On longer time scales, it refers to local and global relationships.
This chapter examines a wide range of approaches to consonance/dissonance, focusing on four debates: the age-old sensus/ratio discussion, contrapuntal treatises, non-Western evidence from cognitive science, and evolutionary arguments.
