
Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/the-jaws-theme-might-not-be-scary-for-tsimane-people/
======
TheOtherHobbes
Most of these chords aren't truly dissonant. They're very rare in pre-romantic
classical music, but in jazz/pop theory they're considered basic triads with
added colour notes, not weird exotic sounds from musical hell.

Most people will have grown up hearing sequences that use mostly 7ths and/or
9ths, and won't think of them as exotic or strange at all.

The ones that are dissonant - like the Dom 7#11, and some of the clusters -
fall later down the preference list, just as you'd expect them to.

The simplest dissonant chords are the basic augmented and diminished triads,
and the authors didn't include them in the tests - which is a bizarre and
curious omission.

~~~
ciconia
> They're very rare in pre-romantic classical music...

Not true. Some styles of classical music employ dissonance in a prominent way
- from late 14th century Ars Subtilior, through the pre-baroque stylus
fantasticus and the bold chromaticism of Gesualdo, Frescobaldi, de Macke and
others, and to the late baroque with Bach, Vivaldi, Zelenka, Rebel and others.

~~~
cynicalkane
In traditional harmony something is considered "dissonant" if it's not part of
the root triad in root inversion. All such chords are unstable, the theory
goes, and must eventually resolve to some tonic chord. Classical harmony
sticks almost exclusively to diatonic intervals, triads, and sevenths, and
uses inversions and juxtaposition of chords (in sequence, via 'suspension',
and so on) to provide "dissonance".

This isn't the kind of dissonant the OP is talking about. I'd be very
surprised if you can come up with a clashing jumble like a Dom7#11 in Bach,
even as a suspension or pedal. Cluster chords in classical music are almost
unheard of.

~~~
acjohnson55
"Traditional harmony" evolved after the Medieval and Renaissance music the
parent post is referring to, which can sound rather radical by Classical Era
standards, by which time the diatonic harmony you speak of dominated
professionally composed music. I'm not am expert, but I understand Western
folk music traditions remained pretty funky.

~~~
cynicalkane
Not really. Western folk music is usually harmonically conservative. As for
art music, the codification of classical harmony began with Renaissance
theorists and the standard codifications are based on that lineage of thought.
Counter-reformation composers like Palestrina were considered the most
harmonically "perfect". The few true weirdos like Gesualdo were considered,
well, really weird and thus excluded from common practice. Finally, most of
the guys mentioned by the previous poster are actually Baroque.

I don't think even Gesualdo used chord clusters. IIRC it was his chromatic
sense of tonality that was shocking, not his choice of chords.

~~~
apendleton
You guys aren't disagreeing exactly. acjohnson55 mentioned "Medieval and
Renaissance" but you're just talking about the Renaissance, and the Medieval-
to-Renaissance transition is the interesting part (I think acjohnson55 just
got the timing a bit wrong). The major third as a consonant interval became
accepted in the early Renaissance. Most medieval composers considered thirds
to be dissonant, which makes medieval music sound strange to modern listeners
because things don't resolve as we expect them to, with phrases often ending
on open fourths or fifths instead of triads (though to be fair, their third
was somewhat different than ours because of changes in temperament over time).

~~~
akacase
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_interval](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_interval)

------
weinzierl
Quote from the arstechnica article:

> This suggests that preference for consonance over dissonance isn’t baked
> into universal human auditory processing, but is rather something we develop
> by being exposed to certain kinds of frequency relationships in the music
> that we hear.

No, that is not a conclusion that can be drawn from the experiment and not the
conclusion the paper draws.

Quote from the paper:

> The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures
> sufficiently isolated from Western music [...]

From what I understand the experiment shows that there are peoples that have
not developed harmony until now. They make music, but they only play notes in
a sequence never simultaneously. This is not surprising, western music
developed real harmony only in the modern era, music of the middle ages was
mostly melodic.

That they have no harmony does not mean that preference for consonance over
dissonance isn’t baked into universal human auditory processing because if
they would develop harmony they might end up with the same preferences we have
because we share the same human auditory processing.

~~~
eyelidlessness
> That they have no harmony does not mean that preference for consonance over
> dissonance isn’t baked into universal human auditory processing because if
> they would develop harmony they might end up with the same preferences we
> have because we share the same human auditory processing.

Or they might develop the same preferences because they're exposed to the same
stimuli. Or they might not develop the same preferences at all. Or they might
prefer alternation between both.

~~~
solidsnack9000
The paper -- its experiment -- doesn't really tell us.

It would seem that proof of the assertion in question would require finding
people with a notion of musical harmony that is genuinely dissonant.

------
mrob
Although the article talks about pitch ratios, there's no evidence that the
human brain contains any hardware for pitch ratio detection. Consonance of
simple ratios is a result of a simpler underlying rule, explained by William
Sethares here:

[http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html)

Note that this only happens with musical instruments featuring overtones based
around the harmonic series, which usually means instruments based on vibrating
strings or vibrating columns of air. These are by far the most common
instruments in Western music, but this is not the case for cultures that
heavily use tuned percussion. Tuned percussion can easily have enharmonic
timbres, which require different tuning systems for control of consonance and
dissonance.

Note that Sethares' theory says nothing about dissonance being good or bad,
and this new study says nothing about whether Tsimane people are capable of
detecting dissonance or not. As the vast majority of humans can detect
consonance and dissonance, including babies (see
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222455086_'Infants'...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222455086_'Infants'_Perception_of_Consonance_and_Dissonance_in_Music')
), I would personally be surprised if they were incapable of perceiving it. I
think it's more likely that their culture simply does not value consonance.
The same is true of some Western subcultures. Atonal composition is high
status with many music academics, and it's genuinely enjoyable to many of
them. I've enjoyed listening to atonal compositions myself.

~~~
twelvechairs
> no evidence that the human brain contains any hardware for pitch ratio
> detection. Consonance of simple ratios is a result of a simpler underlying
> rule,

My reading of your link is that it doesnt argue against pitch ratios being
fundamental - what it does do is say that ratios are not only happening in
chords but also in the sound of a single note, in different ways for different
instruments.

This is very interesting work though and to me at least much more interesting
than the headline post here which just points out the blindingly obvious
(people raised in different musical cultures hear things differently)

~~~
mrob
The most fundamental aspect of dissonance is the empirically measured Plomp
and Levelt curve. This is approximated as: d(x)=e^(-3.5x)-e^(-5.75x), where x
is the difference in frequency between two pure sine tones. (see
[http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf))

If we decompose sounds into sine waves, and sum the values on the Plomp and
Levelt curve for all the pairs of sines, weighted by amplitude, then for the
specific case of timbres based around the harmonic series, the minima for the
dissonance curve happen to fall at simple ratios. This does not mean the brain
is actually counting cycles! It's only a coincidence, and for other timbres
the minima fall at different places.

~~~
twelvechairs
The curve describes the (approximate) outcome. It doesnt prove or disprove how
brain processes work. What we do know is that the outcomes are related to both
these curves and simple ratios.

For me it seems logical that the brain (as a well established pattern matching
machine) is probably doing something far more primative than calculating
exponential curves. But if thats your view i cant disprove it.

~~~
chillingeffect
The disconnect here is because the basic function of acoustic dissonance takes
places in the hair cells of the ear. Harmonic ratios simply resonate hair
cells in steady patterns rather than fast beat frequencies. (Slow beat
frequencies are generally non-dissonant).

Studies like the OP's turn up every few years and are massively flawed due to
oversimplification. Acoustic dissonance is waaaay more than a single-
dimensional binary function... and then cultural layers are added.

------
kazinator
Dissonant tones also sound fine to people raised on Western music, which
contains dissonant tones.

"Dissonant" is not a synonym for "not fine".

Culture doesn't fix the fact that if you play a perfect perfect fifth (exactly
2:3 frequency mix) the blend is very homogeneous, whereas if the ratio is off,
you hear "beats" in it. Those beats are not produced by your upbringing.

~~~
haberman
You are reacting to an article headline. Your point doesn't really make sense
when you look at the actual study. The study found that western ears actively
preferred the consonant chords, whereas the indigenous people had no
preference. That is an actual empirically-demonstrated difference.

------
Sylos
I would be interested in their reaction to two notes being played which are
just slightly out of tune.

Because it definitely seems like something which can be trained - professional
musicians often have a pain-like reaction to it, while your Average Joe just
notices that it sounds bad.

But at the same time, your Average Joe still notices that it sounds bad, and
yeah, just like with dissonances, it's hard to imagine someone who doesn't.

Personally I do think that they would dislike it, because I have this theory,
which is somewhat similar to / a generalization of the Uncanny Valley theory
[0]. That theory is that we fundamentally dislike anything which is not
similar enough to something else to be perceived as the same thing, but
neither different enough from it to be clearly distinguishable as something
different.

So, no matter if that's two tones which are slightly out of tune, a painting
with bright blue right next to baby blue, a shadow in the dark, or rice with
noodles.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

~~~
gardano
Take a gander at an actual 17th century composer playing with that idea in a
most audacious way [0]. The section of the piece I'm referring to begins
around 3:26.

The idea seems to be, keys that are foreign to the piece _should_ sound
dissonant.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbrrMtWICs4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbrrMtWICs4)

~~~
pYQAJ6Zm
I am not a musician and, after listening to the piece, I was left with a
question. To me, that part does sound playfully dissonant, yet it’s enjoyable.
But I wonder, is this dissonance just a product of its key being foreign to
the piece, as you say, or is there any chord in use that would be considered
dissonant by music theory?

~~~
gardano
It's got more to do with the tuning system.

Think of it as '6 degrees of separation'. The further away I am away from the
starting point, the more alien the tuning would be, and therefore the more
startling the sound.

During this period in music, the ideal was to make the 'home base' key to be
as perfectly in tune as possible (making adjustments of course).

Michelangelo Rossi is playing with this, and is pushing the boundaries of
those assumptions. William Byrd did much the same in England at pretty much
the same time.

It makes me wonder if the hyper-specialised quarter-tone composers of our day
might have had a better time of it if we had never adopted equal temperament
as the standard…

------
SuperPaintMan
This pops up in abstracted painting as well, colours (more specfically the
feelings/emotions we ascribe to a particular combunations) are entirely
created due our cultural context. The greatest example of this is the colour
of death, Black for western contries, White for eastern.

Western fine art is more formulaic in it's creation, due to training using
colour wheels (complementary across, traidic and other geometric harmonies)
and a analytic notion of these harmonies.Even the pleasing ratios of area are
codified (5:1 Yellow:Purple for weight balence) Itten wrote quite a few books
on balence/design and became a major influence on modern art. Contrast this
with naieve/primal forms created by those without that training.

One size fits all does not work for the arts. It cant be a product that is
objectively correct.

Now if someone played a diasonant frequency and time the beat such that it
fell in line with the tempo of a composition. That would be a cool way to add
structure to a work. No idea on how to do the math here, but how many cent
under standard tuning would generate this for an andante tempo?

~~~
stephengillie
Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death? To me,
it has always represented either nothingness, like the void of Space, or
opting out of an aesthetic choice - I don't know what color car I want to
drive, so I'll just get a black one.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Try this: what color is death to you?

~~~
pvaldes
In occident there is a general consensus that black is the normal color for
death, but in some parts of Asia death is represented by white. This is the
reason of karategi being white for example.

~~~
stephengillie
Most martial arts uniforms are white. Due to this, it could be said that white
is the color of learning to fight.

~~~
pvaldes
Are white in japanese martial arts, for the same reason, but white is not so
present in Indonesian schools of martial arts for example. It was supposed to
intimidate the oponent. But the context was lost in occident. White were also
much easier to clean, so was readily adopted and a practical choice indoors.
In real war is not so practical, white gets dust and turns quickly to kaki,
other historical uniforms were scarlet red with the purpose of hiding the
blood (and vital info about the damage done to his carrier). With fire
weapons, all those bright colors turned out to make easier targets and all
armies learn quickly to addopt camo.

------
dahart
> Tsimane music also doesn’t make use of harmony: only one series of notes is
> played at a time, so the relationships between notes don’t matter in their
> musical tradition.

This makes me wonder if the Tsimane don't hear dissonant harmony, but just two
different melodies, like two different people talking at once rather than a
chord.

Maybe in a way this is similar but opposite to how it takes a little bit of
listening before you can hear Tuvan throat singing clearly - at first it
sounds like one note, but after a while you get better at hearing the
overtones they're modulating.

Personally, I find that some chords that sound dissonant when played alone and
out of context turn around completely and sound gorgeous and intriguing when
played as part of a piece.

Minor 6 chords are amazing in the right context, and diminished and augmented
scales too. Some of my favorite Bach pieces are the ones that hit a measure or
two of fully diminished key.

Is it possible that part of the surprise here is that we've overstated
dissonance as something negative, and led ourselves to expect something
"dissonant" to be more cacophonous than it really is? I do prefer describing
music more in terms of tension and resolution than consonance and dissonance.
And tension is a critical part for the resolution to have it's full effect and
power, it provides the contrast, and it often comes with as much or more
subtlety and beauty, as far as I can tell.

------
ollybee
There was a dicsussion and interview with studys author (srongly named as
Johsn in the arstechnica aticle) recently on BBC radio 4's Inside cience.
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07jqr1y](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07jqr1y)
15:10

------
nabla9
They should test how well if Tsimane people are able to differentiate between
consonant harmony and dissonant harmony.

It's weird that if you go all the trouble travel into far away places to test
things, but you don't test for that.

~~~
theophrastus
Probably a much trickier study, (involving autopsies?), but it would be
informative to compare the distribution of the cochlear hairs among various
groups of people. To what degree the arrangement is in logarithmic series [1]

[1]
[http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/acoustics/ear.htm](http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/acoustics/ear.htm)
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756239208...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175623920800181X)

~~~
nabla9
???

First you give them few labeled examples of consonant ad harmony then
dissonant harmony and then ask them to label next examples.

~~~
taejo
Theophrastus is not talking about your experiment, but suggesting another.

------
ChuckMcM
It makes me wonder about the birds. To my ear birdsong is typically more
consonant in general use and dissonant in alarm or alert use. But a quick
search did not turn up a lot of research in that space.

------
bbgm
It's not just for western music. Hindustani music is more "quantized" around
scales than Carnatic music, and many North Indians find it harder to listen to
Carnatic music for that reason.

------
elihu
> To explore the effects of harmonicity and roughness found in Study 1, we
> measured pleasantness ratings for pairs of pure tones (single frequencies)
> separated by intervals from the chromatic scale (0–8 semitones)21 (Fig. 3f).
> This range includes some consonant intervals, for which the tone frequencies
> approximate harmonics of a common fundamental (and are thus related by
> simple integer ratios), and some dissonant intervals, for which the tone
> frequencies are inharmonic.

So... they went and found a group of people unfamiliar with western music, and
then tested which of the intervals from 12-tone-equal-temperament sound good
to them?

What would be the result if we were to repeat the test with people familiar
with western music, but the notes were taken from 13-tone-equal-temperament?
What conclusions (if any) could we draw from that about whether those familiar
with western music appreciate harmony?

Granted, notes like the equal-tempered major third are probably close enough
to their just equivalents (such as the 5:4 major third) that to someone who
was familiar with the latter, the former would probably be recognized as such
even to one who had never heard equal-tempered intervals before, but still
they'd probably sound weirdly out-of-tune. (The ET third is about 15 cents
sharp of the just third.) Why not just test with just intervals, which are
more universal/fundamental than equal tempered intervals, which are sort of a
modern "good enough" compromise we use for convenience.

------
djhworld
That Bobby McFerrin video is one of my favourite videos on YouTube, never
fails to make me smile

------
white-flame
> Musical perception is, surprisingly, not shared by all humans.

s/surprisingly/unsurprisingly/

~~~
arkx
s/surprisingly/un&/

------
fiatjaf

       With cross-cultural tasks, there is always a risk that 
       participants don’t have the right idea about what they 
       should be doing. To control for this, the researchers also 
       played participants vocal noises and found that all groups 
       preferred laughter rather than gasps.
    

What? It is a much different thing noticing differences between melodies and
differences between laughs and gasps.

------
tamana
This is a reblog of this 90pt 76comment story from 2 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12093240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12093240)

[http://www.nature.com/news/poor-musical-taste-blame-your-
upb...](http://www.nature.com/news/poor-musical-taste-blame-your-
upbringing-1.20256)

------
hellofunk
The irony is that the Western concept of something that is "in tune" is
actually dissonant to the same Western cultures of the past. Well-tempered
tuning has only been around since Bach's time. Our music today would not sound
right to those during or before his time, in general.

------
gluelogic
The idea that a culture can arbitrary accept "dissonant tones" as long as they
have not been conditioned otherwise suggests that I can button-mash a keyboard
and maybe they would find it pleasurable.

Perhaps consonance and dissonance are concepts that are largely defined by
musical circumstances. If that's the case, then it doesn't make sense to
approach the problem with a sort of western definition of dissonance.

In other words, I think it's safe to assume every culture has an idea of what
is tasteful and what is not in their music. The way I see it, if you take that
position, then you can also assume the culture has their own definitions of
what is consonant and what is dissonant. These may or may not coincide with
the western theory of common practice period harmony.

------
mmaunder
Hard to believe a 5th doesn't sound sweet(er) to all. Even Pythagoras thought
so.

------
scandox
I noticed my four year old daughter relishes quite outlandish and dissonant
modern classical music. The sort of stuff most people ask me to shut off the
moment it starts.

------
plorg
They used to teach this as an open enrollment course in college (at least
mine, which was not atypical of the larger liberal arts college scene). It was
called "music of non-western cultures", and pretty much everyone who took it
came out with the opinion that this non-western music was pretty interesting
and cool.

I mean, c'mon. Anyone who has been exposed to the concept of non-western music
will know that the 12-tone scale is not a universal construction.

~~~
jakub_h
Well, let's not read much into it. The headline says that dissonant tones
sound fine to people not raised on Western music. It _doesn 't_ say that
dissonant tones _don 't_ sound fine to people raised on Western music. ;)

------
wcoenen
Too bad that the article doesn't even attempt to explain what is going on
mathematically. Dissonance is closely related to beating[1], the phenomenon
where the sum of two slightly different frequencies results in an oscillation
at a low frequency.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28acoustics%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28acoustics%29)

------
fiatjaf
Or we could interpret it into saying that cultures with less developed musical
culture, like this Tsimane, do not notice very well the subtleties of the
songs, and may well find any strange noise "good", just like the young people
in our culture (it doesn't matter that the strange noises young people hear
are always tonal, they are used here just as an example).

~~~
fiatjaf

        gathering data from 64 Tisane people, as well as 50 urban Bolivians, 25 US non-musicians, and 23 US musicians
        
        different group of 49 Tsimane people and 47 musically trained people in the US
    

Where are the trained tsimane musicians?

------
geff82
Being married to an Iranian, I hear a lot of persian music. Especially the
traditional one sounds really "dissonant" to my western ear and it took me
years to accustom. Of course for my wife and all of her family persian tunes
sound perfectly harmonious.

------
cel1ne
Not really news.

Also quarter-tone music sounds weird to western ears and is common around the
world.

~~~
kpil
But "traditional" quarter-tone music typically does not use much harmonics,
right?

I think you need to practice to appreciate music - some people get just
stressed by listening to a complex Bach fugue, and some get equally stressed
when listening to rap music or traditional jazz. Probably because they do not
pick up the nuances.

~~~
cel1ne
Certain kinds of music certainly. And you can also lose this appreciation. I
listened to various industrial artists some years back and enjoyed their
complex arrangement. Or to stuff like Sunn-O.

Nowadays I just feel it's noise, most of the time.

------
pessimizer
Traditional Ganga singing:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XAKuG5_FHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XAKuG5_FHw)

------
kingkawn
More glory for semantics at the expense of understanding

------
fiatjaf
This seems like clickbait. I'll read it, however.

