Search results for "Consonance and dissonance"
showing 10 items of 11 documents
Neural discrimination of nonprototypical chords in music experts and laymen:an MEG study
2009
Abstract At the level of the auditory cortex, musicians discriminate pitch changes more accurately than nonmusicians. However, it is not agreed upon how sound familiarity and musical expertise interact in the formation of pitch-change discrimination skills, that is, whether musicians possess musical pitch discrimination abilities that are generally more accurate than in nonmusicians or, alternatively, whether they may be distinguished from nonmusicians particularly with respect to the discrimination of nonprototypical sounds that do not play a reference role in Western tonal music. To resolve this, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the change-related magnetic mismatch response…
Spike train statistics for consonant and dissonant musical accords in a simple auditory sensory model
2010
The phenomena of dissonance and consonance in a simple auditory sensory model composed of three neurons are considered. Two of them, here so-called sensory neurons, are driven by noise and subthreshold periodic signals with different ratio of frequencies, and its outputs plus noise are applied synaptically to a third neuron, so-called interneuron. We present a theoretical analysis with a probabilistic approach to investigate the interspike intervals statistics of the spike train generated by the interneuron. We find that tones with frequency ratios that are considered consonant by musicians produce at the third neuron inter-firing intervals statistics densities that are very distinctive fro…
Different Brain Mechanisms Mediate Sensitivity to Sensory Consonance and Harmonic Context: Evidence from Auditory Event-Related Brain Potentials
2001
Abstract The goal of this study was to analyze the time-course of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) processes that govern musical harmonic expectancy. Eight-chord sequences were presented to 12 musicians and 12 nonmusicians. Expectations for the last chord were manipulated both at the sensory level (i.e., the last chord was sensory consonant or dissonant) and at the cognitive level (the harmonic function of the target was varied by manipulating the harmonic context built up by the first six chords of the sequence). Changes in the harmonic function of the target chord mainly modulate the amplitude of a positive component peaking around 300 msec (P3) after target onset, reflecting …
Global context effects on musical expectancy.
1997
The effects of global harmonic contexts on expectancy formation were studied in a set of three experiments. Eight-chord sequences were presented to subjects. Expectations for the last chord were varied by manipulating the harmonic context created by the first six: in one context, the last chord was part of an authentic cadence (V–I), whereas in the other, it was a fourth harmonic degree following a full cadence (I–IV). Given this change in harmonic function, the last chord was assumed to be more expected in the former context, all the other local parameters being held constant. The effect of global context on expectancy formation was supported by the fact that subjects reported a lower degr…
Geography of Emotions Across the Black Mediterranean: Oral Memories and Dissonant Heritages of Slavery and the Colonial Past
2019
AbstractThis contribution is dedicated to analysing oral memories about the Black Mediterranean through interviews with people from or culturally linked to the Horn of Africa. The aim is to consider how the interviewees make use of archives to voice their feelings about the past and present in Africa and Europe. I introduce the concept of a “geography of emotions” as a set of different perceptions of Europe and its past. The mobilization of these memories in new interpretative perspectives is part of a dissonant heritage which is actively working inside the European borders in order to produce new cultural identities, to reiterate forms of belonging to black diasporic communities, and to in…
Introduction: Europe, Heritage and Memory—Dissonant Encounters and Explorations
2019
AbstractThe introduction to Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe theoretically grounds the book’s various problematizations of heritage and identity struggles in Europe today, including the heritage policies of the EU and other intergovernmental organizations, struggles over ethnographic and historical exhibitions, activist practices, and dissonant memories. By discussing these struggles and their problematizations, the introduction connects the book to a wide range of ongoing debates across the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, it discusses how convergences and divergences within and between the volume’s chapters foster new insights regarding the concepts…
Mild Dissonance Preferred Over Consonance in Single Chord Perception
2016
Previous research on harmony perception has mainly been concerned with horizontal aspects of harmony, turning less attention to how listeners perceive psychoacoustic qualities and emotions in single isolated chords. A recent study found mild dissonances to be more preferred than consonances in single chord perception, although the authors did not systematically vary register and consonance in their study; these omissions were explored here. An online empirical experiment was conducted where participants ( N = 410) evaluated chords on the dimensions of Valence, Tension, Energy, Consonance, and Preference; 15 different chords were played with piano timbre across two octaves. The results sugg…
Further Investigation of Harmonic Priming in Long Contexts Using Musical Timbre as Surface Marker to Control for Temporal Effects
2004
Harmonic priming studies have reported facilitated processing for chords that are harmonically related to the prime context. Responses to the target (the last chord of an 8-chord sequence) were faster and more accurate when the target was strongly related, i.e., a tonic chord, to the preceding prime context than when it was less related, i.e., a subdominant chord. Results have been interpreted in terms of musical expectations and processing speed: the prime allows listeners to develop expectations for future events which lead to facilitated processing of the most strongly expected event. The present experiment investigated an alternative hypothesis suggesting that the harmonic structure of…
Children's implicit knowledge of harmony in Western music.
2005
Three experiments examined children's knowledge of harmony in Western music. The children heard a series of chords followed by a final, target chord. In Experiment 1, French 6- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was sung with the vowel /i/ or /u/. In Experiment 2, Australian 8- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was played on a piano or a trumpet. In Experiment 3, Canadian 8- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target sounded good (i.e. consonant) or bad (dissonant). The target was either the most stable chord in the established musical key (i.e. the tonic, based on do, the first note of the scale) or a less stable chord. Performance was faster (Experiments 1, 2 and 3) and m…
Newborn infants' auditory system is sensitive to Western music chord categories
2013
Neural encoding of abstract rules in the audition of newborn infants has been recently demonstrated in several studies using event-related potentials (ERPs). In the present study the neural encoding of Western music chords was investigated in newborn infants. Using ERPs, we examined whether the categorizations of major vs. minor and consonance vs. dissonance are present at the level of the change-related mismatch response (MMR). Using an oddball paradigm, root minor, dissonant and inverted major chords were presented in a context of consonant root major chords. The chords were transposed to several different frequency levels, so that the deviant chords did not include a physically deviant f…