Trends in consonance preference across musical cultures

The musical phenomenon of consonance preference - the perception of specific pitch combinations
as more pleasant than others - has intrigued scholars since antiquity. Recent empirical studies
(Eerola & Lahdelma, 2021; Friedman et al., 2021; Harrison & Pearce, 2020; Smit et al., 2019) have
made progress in identifying the factors underlying consonance preference, with roughness,
harmonicity, and familiarity emerging as core contributors (Harrison, 2021). However, the
conception of consonance as a function of low roughness and high harmonicity is informed by
listening experiments involving almost exclusively Western participants, and analyses of Western
musical scores. There is preliminary evidence that background scale structures across diverse
cultures favour smooth and harmonic intervals (McBride & Tlusty, 2020; Gill & Purves, 2009), but
claims that actual musical practice exhibits a cross-cultural trend towards roughness minimisation
and harmonicity maximisation (Bowling et al., 2017; Schellenberg & Trehub, 1996) are not rigorously
substantiated. No studies of musical corpora (collections of music in audio or notated form) have
investigated the statistical prevalence of simultaneous pitch combinations (a proxy for consonance;
Parncutt et al., 2019; Harrison & Pearce, 2020) in non-Western musics. The possibility remains open
that consonance preference as a function of low roughness and high harmonicity is a phenomenon
isolated to contemporary Western listeners and recent Western musical practice. This possibility
must be investigated to shed light on the similarities and differences in human music perception
across cultures, to determine whether Western-centric assumptions of universality are valid, and to
highlight music from non-Western countries as worthy of scientific inquiry.
I propose to fill in the abovementioned gaps in contemporary consonance research, to establish
whether recent findings generalise cross-culturally and historically. This will be accomplished
through corpus studies and listening experiments. The corpus studies will expand existing research
into historical Western music (Parncutt et al., 2019) using improved sampling methods and more
appropriate computational models (Harrison & Pearce, 2020; Eerola & Lahdelma, 2021) and break
new ground by examining culturally diverse corpora, to determine the historical stability of the
Western consonance concept and its applicability to music at a global scale. The findings of these
corpus studies will inform hypotheses for designing methodologically sound and culturally sensitive
cross-cultural listening experiments to provide direct evidence of the behaviour of the consonance
phenomenon in listeners from non-Western cultures.