Japanese monkeys perceive sensory consonance of chords

Consonance/dissonance affects human perception of chords from early stages of development e.g., Schellenberg and Trainor, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100, 3321-3328 (1996). To examine whether consonance has some role in audition of nonhumans, three Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata) were trained to discriminate simultaneous two-tone complexes (chords). The task was serial discrimination (AX procedure) with repetitive presentation of background stimuli. Each tone in a chord was comprised of six harmonics, and chords with complex ratios of fundamental frequency (e.g., frequency ratio of 8:15 in major seventh) resulted in dissonance. The chords were transposed for each presentation to make monkeys attend to cues other than the absolute frequency of a component tone. Monkeys were initially trained to detect changes from consonant (octave) to dissonant (major seventh). Following the successful acquisition of the task, transfer tests with novel chords were conducted. In these transfer tests, the performances with detecting changes from consonant to dissonant chords (perfect fifth to major seventh; perfect fourth to major seventh) were better than those with detecting reverse changes. These results suggested that the consonance of chords affected the performances of monkeys.