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Congenital amusia produces abnormal perception of dissonance despite normal perception of beating: New evidence for the role of harmonicity in consonance perception| old_uid | 10662 |
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| title | Congenital amusia produces abnormal perception of dissonance despite normal perception of beating: New evidence for the role of harmonicity in consonance perception |
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| start_date | 2012/01/12 |
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| schedule | 11h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Bat enseignement, salle de seminaire |
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| details | Conférence CRNL-CAP, Equipe Cognition Auditive et Psychoacoustique - Dir B. Tillmann |
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| summary | Western listeners usually prefer consonant chords to dissonant chords, the contrast of which plays a central role in Western music. Classically, dissonance was widely believed to be the product of beating between frequency components. However, inharmonicity has also been proposed as an acoustic correlate, with recent support coming from individual differences (McDermott et al. 2010). To gain further insight into consonance and its relation to pitch, harmonicity and beating, we explored their perception in amusic listeners. Amusia is a congenital disorder characterized by a failure to acquire musical aptitude in individuals who are otherwise normal, and is believed to at least partly reflect impaired pitch perception. We used stimuli from McDermott et al. (2010) to assess amusic preferences for musical chords as well as for the isolated acoustic properties of beating and inharmonicity. Amusic and control subjects rated the pleasantness of stimuli on a 9-step scale. Control subjects’ ratings were consistent with previous results, with conventionally dissonant chords such as the minor second consistently rated as unpleasant, and conventionally consonant chords such as the major third consistently rated as pleasant. In contrast, amusic listeners provided inconsistent ratings that showed little resemblance to the pattern found in normal listeners. Despite the absence of preferences for consonant over dissonant chords, amusics showed the normally observed preference for stimuli without beating over matched stimuli containing beats. They did not, however, exhibit the preference observed in normal listeners for harmonic over inharmonic tones. Overall, the results show that the perception of isolated chords and of harmonicity is abnormal in amusic listeners, whereas the perception of beating is spared. The dissociation between beating preferences and consonance preferences provides novel evidence for a strong contribution of harmonicity to consonance and dissonance. |
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| responsibles | Béranger, Rossetti |
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