The Use of Acoustic Measures of Dissonance to Characterize Pitch-Class Sets
Gregory Danner · Music Perception An Interdisciplinary Journal · 1985
Recent scholarship in acoustics has provided a mathematical model for the approximation of what has been termed "acoustic dissonance," or "roughness" in the interaction of two or more simultaneously sounded complex tones. Although these measures necessitate certain artificial considerations in their present form (i. e., spectrum, dynamics), their application should be of considerable interest to musical scholars interested in this aspect of musical style and structure. This article provides an overview of the acoustical theory, its application in profiling pitch-class sets, and a representative musical analysis.