Trends in consonance preference across musical cultures

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The musical phenomenon of consonance preference - the perception of specific pitch combinationsas 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) havemade progress in identifying the factors underlying consonance preference, with roughness,harmonicity, and familiarity emerging as core contributors (Harrison, 2021). However, theconception of consonance as a function of low roughness and high harmonicity is informed bylistening experiments involving almost exclusively Western participants, and analyses of Westernmusical scores. There is preliminary evidence that background scale structures across diversecultures favour smooth and harmonic intervals (McBride & Tlusty, 2020; Gill & Purves, 2009), butclaims that actual musical practice exhibits a cross-cultural trend towards roughness minimisationand harmonicity maximisation (Bowling et al., 2017; Schellenberg & Trehub, 1996) are not rigorouslysubstantiated. No studies of musical corpora (collections of music in audio or notated form) haveinvestigated 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 openthat consonance preference as a function of low roughness and high harmonicity is a phenomenonisolated to contemporary Western listeners and recent Western musical practice. This possibilitymust be investigated to shed light on the similarities and differences in human music perceptionacross cultures, to determine whether Western-centric assumptions of universality are valid, and tohighlight music from non-Western countries as worthy of scientific inquiry.I propose to fill in the abovementioned gaps in contemporary consonance research, to establishwhether recent findings generalise cross-culturally and historically. This will be accomplishedthrough corpus studies and listening experiments. The corpus studies will expand existing researchinto historical Western music (Parncutt et al., 2019) using improved sampling methods and moreappropriate computational models (Harrison & Pearce, 2020; Eerola & Lahdelma, 2021) and breaknew ground by examining culturally diverse corpora, to determine the historical stability of theWestern consonance concept and its applicability to music at a global scale. The findings of thesecorpus studies will inform hypotheses for designing methodologically sound and culturally sensitivecross-cultural listening experiments to provide direct evidence of the behaviour of the consonancephenomenon in listeners from non-Western cultures.