Musical Consonance and Dissonance
Nicola Di Stefano · 2025
Nicola Di Stefano (0000-0002-9286-0395) This chapter aims to provide a review of the Gestalt -related sources and concepts that have been deemed relevant for the understanding of musical consonance and dissonance (C/D). I will start by considering the works of Hermann von Helmholtz and Carl Stumpf. While the former provided the first physiological explanation of the phenomenon of consonance (Helmholtz, 1954), the latter inaugurated the psychological approach to C/D, proposing a perceptual explanation of consonance based on the notion of “perceptual fusion” (Stumpf, 1890, 1898). Then, I will move on to discussing the concept of perceptual coherence, tracing a link between its original applications to visual objects in the Gestalt tradition (e.g., Kanizsa figures) and recent research on auditory consonance, based on the neurophysiological findings demonstrating that brain responses that are typically associated with more coherent percepts in vision (see, e.g., Kaiser et al., 2004, for Kanizsa triangles) are also elicited by the perception of consonant sounds (Passynkova et al., 2007; Park et al., 2011). In line with the pioneering insight of Stumpf (1890), these findings suggest that consonant sounds are more fuse, unitary, and coherent percepts compared with dissonant ones, which might produce a breakdown of the percept of a unitary sound (see, e.g., Csibra et al., 2000; Müller et al., 1997). I will finally relate the concept of perceptual coherence to the “processing fluency” theory, which suggests that the more fluently the perceiver can process an object, the more positive his or her aesthetic response is (Reber et al., 2004). Given the abundance of findings suggesting that Western listeners have a preference for listening to consonant, as opposed to dissonant, stimuli, I conclude by suggesting that the pleasantness of consonances can result from some Gestalt laws of perception, such as perceptual coherence and processing fluency (see, e.g., Bidelman & Krishnan, 2009, for neurophysiological findings supporting this claim), and might ultimately be related to the Gestalt concept of Prägnanz (Luccio, 1986; Arnheim, 1987).