Subject: New musical-consonance experiment. From: Reinhart Frosch <reinifrosch(at)BLUEWIN.CH> Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 07:17:39 +0200Dear 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(at)bluewin.ch