Consonance and Dissonance

Despite their fundamental importance to music theory, consonance and dissonance are surprisingly slippery concepts. They cannot unequivocally be identified as acoustical, aesthetic, physiological, psychological, or cultural-historical. This chapter examines a wide range of approaches to consonance/dissonance, focusing on four debates: the age-old sensus/ratio discussion, contrapuntal treatises, non-Western evidence from cognitive science, and evolutionary arguments. The discussion includes musical examples by Joseph Haydn, Alban Berg, Tsimane′ singing, and various European compositions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It is impossible to fully close the gap between different approaches, in part because different definitions take their starting points in different objects: cognitive approaches work with sounds while music-theoretical traditions work with notes and intervals. But the diversity of approaches opens up new angles on certain conflations that music theory often tolerates—such as the equivocation between successive and simultaneous intervals—to illustrate how the consonance/dissonance pair functions in different contexts.

Natural Musical Intervals: Evidence From Infant Listeners

Ancient and medieval scholars considered tones related by simple (small-integer) ratios to be naturally pleasing, but contemporary scholars attribute the special perceptual status of such sounds to exposure We investigated the possibility of processing predispositions for some tone combinations by evaluating infants' ability to detect subtle changes to patterns of simultaneous and sequential tones Infants detected such changes to pairs of pure tones (intervals) only when the tones were related by simple frequency ratios This was the case for 9-month-old infants tested with harmonic (simultaneous) intervals and for 6-month-old infants tested with melodic (sequential) intervals These results are consistent with a biological basis for the prevalence of particular intervals historically and cross-culturally

THE PARTICIPATION OF THE LIVER IN THE FORMATION OF POSTHEPARIN ESTERASES

The task of the study was to ascertain the participation of the liver in the formation of postheparin esterases. The chronic experiments were carried out on dogs with acrylic vascular cannulas placed into the hepatic vein and vena portae according to London. The modified operation is described in the paper in detail. Heparin was administered in the dose of 200 I.U. per 1 kg body weight into vena portae or one of the hepatic veins. Blood was drawn from these veins at short simultaneous intervals and the activity of postheparin esterases was determined in it. The activity of serum esterases was estimated by the Cherry–Crandall method. Control trials were carried out to study the activity of serum esterases after the administration of saline. The results suggest that postheparin esterases originate in the liver.