Musical consonance: a review of theory and evidence on perception and preference of auditory roughness in humans and other animals
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866915650312601600 |
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| author | McBride, John M. |
| author_facet | McBride, John M. |
| contents | The origins of consonance in human music has long been contested, and today there are three primary hypotheses: aversion to roughness, preference for harmonicity, and learned preferences from cultural exposure. While the evidence is currently insufficient to disentangle the contributions of these hypotheses, I propose several reasons why roughness is an especially promising area for future study. The aim of this review is to summarize and critically evaluate roughness theory and models, experimental data, to highlight areas that deserve further research. I identify 2 key areas: There are fundamental issues with the definition and interpretation of results due to tautology in the definition of roughness, and the lack of independence in empirical measurements. Despite extensive model development, there are many duplications and models have issues with data quality and overfitting. Future theory development should aim for model simplicity, and extra assumptions, features and parameters should be evaluated systematically. Model evaluation should aim to maximise the breadth of stimuli that are predicted. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14159 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Musical consonance: a review of theory and evidence on perception and preference of auditory roughness in humans and other animals McBride, John M. Physics and Society Sound Audio and Speech Processing The origins of consonance in human music has long been contested, and today there are three primary hypotheses: aversion to roughness, preference for harmonicity, and learned preferences from cultural exposure. While the evidence is currently insufficient to disentangle the contributions of these hypotheses, I propose several reasons why roughness is an especially promising area for future study. The aim of this review is to summarize and critically evaluate roughness theory and models, experimental data, to highlight areas that deserve further research. I identify 2 key areas: There are fundamental issues with the definition and interpretation of results due to tautology in the definition of roughness, and the lack of independence in empirical measurements. Despite extensive model development, there are many duplications and models have issues with data quality and overfitting. Future theory development should aim for model simplicity, and extra assumptions, features and parameters should be evaluated systematically. Model evaluation should aim to maximise the breadth of stimuli that are predicted. |
| title | Musical consonance: a review of theory and evidence on perception and preference of auditory roughness in humans and other animals |
| topic | Physics and Society Sound Audio and Speech Processing |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14159 |