Converging Evidence for Improved Discrimination of Component Pitches within Consonant versus Dissonant Harmonic Intervals

It has been proposed that certain simultaneous combinations of musical tones may be experienced as more consonant than others because they are more easily processed by the auditory system. Consistent with this notion, a prior study found that individuals were faster and more accurate at detecting the presence of probe tones that were embedded within consonant versus dissonant intervals. However, this study only included musical stimuli within a limited pitch range, did not distinguish perceptual sensitivity from response bias, and may have inadvertently enabled more practice on “consonant” trials, thereby undermining the internal validity of the procedure. We conducted two experiments designed to address these limitations. Our results firmly corroborated that individuals are more accurate in detecting probe tones within consonant versus dissonant intervals. In addition, signal detection analyses newly confirmed that this increment in performance indeed reflects improved discrimination of probe tones within such intervals. Prior findings with regard to reaction time were only partially replicated. Taken together, our findings offer converging evidence for the contention that consonant harmonic intervals facilitate perceptual processing of constituent tones, supporting the possibility that the enhanced processing fluency of these intervals may contribute to their aesthetic appeal.