3 ms·

It’s a learned cultural association. People who have not been exposed to Western music don’t even distinguish consonance from dissonance. https://pubmed.ncbi.n

• slaymaker1907 6y ago
  This is incorrect. Consonance or dissonance is based on physical properties of the sounds. As the paper mentions, pleasantness of the consonance vs dissonance varies from culture to culture. The paper specifically mentions in the abstract that the other cultures were able to distinguish consonance from dissonance.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    The physical property is generally called "roughness" (mostly to disambiguate wrt. the structural sense of 'dissonance' in composition) and is really more of a psychoacoustic property, since it relates to a feature of hearing known as critical bandwidth.
• enriquto 6y ago
  > People who have not been exposed to Western music don’t even distinguish consonance from dissonance. This is false. Any person with a functioning auditory system can hear the beating when you play two very close notes. It is also trivial to model mathematically, using elementary trigonometry. And the beating of periodic waves of very close frequency is precisely the dissonance (especially when the partials of the two notes are close, but do not coincide exactly). Whether this audible beating or dissonance is "good" or "bad", and what is its place in music, is an entirely cultural phenomenon. But the phenomenon itself is not a cultural construction, it is a physical thing. Western music uses dissonance as a tension before a final resolution, and this is of course an arbitrary choice for our musical language.