Psychophysics of Musical Consonance

Musical consonance and dissonance can, to a large extent, be traced back to basic, non-musical principles of auditory perception. The underlying physical, physiological and psychological phenomena appear to co-operate in two rather independent ways. One, first investigated by H. v. Helmholtz, is related to the perception of roughness (fast unresolved beats) among the partials of complex tones. The other one is related to the unique role of harmonic partials as a basic element of pitch perception (pattern recognition). We introduce the most important phenomena in a series of experiments and discuss their present theoretical understanding; we also include new psycho-acoustical data with high statistics obtained recently in Heidelberg. Besides using modern techniques, the experiments contain some demonstrations of original Helmholtz apparatus.