ON CONSONANCE - PLEASANTNESS AND INTERESTINGNESS OF 4 COMPONENT COMPLEX TONES

A modfied form of Chladni's law which describes the vibrational freque ncies of bells, gongs and cymbals has been used to generate a series o f sounds with a range of conventionally calculated dissonance values. Subjects have been exposed to these sounds and asked to rate them in t erms of pleasantness and interest. Only a weak correlation was found b etween pleasantness and calculated dissonance and this disappeared com pletely when an exponential amplitude decay was superimposed on the so unds. It is concluded that a description of consonance in terms of the standard methods of Sethares [1] and Hutchinson and Knopoff [2] may b e flawed.