New musical-consonance experiment.

[Reinhart Frosch <reinifrosch@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear List,

Yesterday I presented the results of my latest
musical-consonance experiment to the annual
meeting of the Swiss Physical Society in Bern.
The title of the parallel session was "Physics
Applied to Various Domains"; there were no questions
after the talk. Maybe some list members have such
questions. The abstract of the talk is  included below.

Reinhart Frosch.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Psycho-Acoustic Experiment on the Sensory Consonance of Deep
Musical Two-Tones.

R. Frosch (r. PSI and ETHZ), CH-5200 Brugg.

The sensory consonance of two simultaneous bowed-string-like
harmonic complex tones, if plotted versus the ratio R of their
frequencies, exhibits narrow peaks at small-integer ratios such
as R = 1/1, 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/3, 5/4, and 6/5. In a previous
peak-height experiment [1] at female-singing pitches the major
third (R = 5/4) was found to be the most consonant of the seven
two-tones specified above. The new experiment featuring complete
paired comparisons and 29 test listeners has confirmed that at
bass pitches (deeper tone at 99 Hz) the ranking of the seven
consonance peaks differs strongly from the higher-tone results
and is consistent with a consonance theory involving the
excitation pattern generated by the partial tones on the basilar
membrane of the inner ear.[2]

[1] R. Frosch, Contribution to Swiss Physical Society meeting
in Basel, March 21, 2003.
[2] R. Frosch, Meantone Is Beautiful (www.peterlang.com, 2002),
pp. 44-66.


Reinhart Frosch,
Dr. phil. nat.,
Sommerhaldenstr. 5B,
CH-5200 Brugg.
Phone: 0041 56 441 77 72.
Mobile: 0041 79 754 30 32.
E-mail: reinifrosch@xxxxxxxxxx