Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Bauer, Gordon

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

Western listeners tend to exhibit a preference for consonant music. Many have argued that this preference is innate, citing ideas like roughness theory and pitch-interval frequency ratio theory as evidence that the perception of consonance is governed by specific acoustic properties inherent to consonant intervals. However, another line of research suggests that perceptions of consonance and dissonance are based more upon expectations generated by previous music experience. Though much study has been conducted in this field, a gap exists concerning the depth of the cognitive processes through which musical stimuli are judged as consonant or dissonant. In an experiment designed to determine whether these judgments occur at a conscious or unconscious level, participants rated the pleasantness of various harmonic pitch-intervals under different levels of cognitive load. Results indicated substantial differences in mean pleasantness rating across pitch-interval type, and slight differences in mean pleasantness rating across cognitive load level for the octave, minor second, major third, tritone, and minor seventh pitch-interval types.

Download

Share

COinS