The source dilemma: Perceptual coherence and the continuum of consonance-dissonance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first author’s past research demonstrated that consonance and dissonance can be modulated through psychoacoustic manipulations that influence the perceptual coherence of musical sounds. These data led to the source dilemma hypothesis, which predicts dissonance to arise from musical stimuli that produce incoherent auditory percepts and consonance to arise from those that produce coherent auditory percepts. In the present studies we sought to replicate the effects of perceptual coherence on consonance and dissonance. Additionally, we investigated a corollary prediction that dissonant music, entailing greater perceptual incoherence, produces greater cognitive interference than consonant music. We tested these predictions with three experiments, in which harmonic, timbral, and spatial psychoacoustic parameters were differentially manipulated to create coherent and incoherent musical counterparts. In each experiment, participants completed a cognitively demanding task (the visual 2-back task) while listening concurrently to no music, coherent music, or incoherent music. Participants then provided consonancedissonance and pleasantness-unpleasantness ratings of each of the musical excerpts. Consistent with the source dilemma hypothesis, we replicated our previous findings that perceptual coherence predicted the listeners’ experience of consonance and dissonance. Additionally, we found in Experiment 1 that incoherent atonal music interfered to a greater extent with cognitive processing of the 2-back task than did coherent tonal music. Surprisingly, however, in Experiments 2 and 3 we found that atonal musics exhibiting timbral and spatial coherence produced greater cognitive interference than did their incoherent atonal counterparts, despite the fact that they were rated as less dissonant and less unpleasant.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".