William Sethares has already done some excellent work towards formalizing consonance and dissonance. See: http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html http://set

William Sethares has already done some excellent work towards formalizing consonance and dissonance. See: http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html This new paper looks worse than Sethares' as it only considers timbres based around the harmonic series, ignoring important sounds such as tuned percussion, and ignoring the possibilities for genuine harmonic novelty with synthesisers. It cites Terhardt (1974) as "modern" while completely ignoring more recent work.