Experimenting with consonance and dissonance
Michael C. LoPresto · Physics Education · 2009
Consonance and dissonance are subjective perceptions that are reactions of the human ear to whether or not musical intervals sound ‘pleasing.’ The physical causes of consonance and dissonance are not as well understood as other subjective properties of sound perceived by the ear such as pitch, loudness, and quality (timbre). What follows is an overview of some attempts to quantify these sensations, and a new study with results that can be compared to several ‘dissonance metrics’.