Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Hypothesis

Description: Musical consonance and dissonance (C/D) refers to the relative agreeableness/stability vs. disagreeableness/need of resolution of simultaneous and successive pitch combinations. The purpose of this study is to explore whether an important element has been omitted from the current research, namely register (the frequency in which the stimuli are presented). In the past, the effect of register has been captured in the form of sharpness which was reported to contribute to consonance (Zwicker & Fastl, 1990). In recent studies, the role of register has been demonstrated to influence C/D ratings when register has been specifically manipulated (Lahdelma & Eerola, 2016) or when the mean pitch of the chords within a same broad register has been included in the modelling (Smit et al., 2019). This pre-registration give details of an empirical experiment designed to probe the role of register in relation to consonance ratings.