Novel musical consonance-dissonance task in normal hearing reference cohort

Background: Harmonic consonance, and its opposite, dissonance, are aspects of music that contribute to the overall sound quality and pleasantness. Listening tasks involving music can be a useful tool to evaluate performance of hearing aids and cochlear implants; however, there is a lack of such tools available currently. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to administer a novel music listening task that assesses harmonic consonance-dissonance and overall music sound quality perception to a cohort of normal hearing listeners, and gather a preliminary set of normative data that may be used for comparison in future studies. Research Design: Subjects were given a questionnaire about their music training background and current music listening habits, and then completed a 30-minute activity that involved listening to music samples and rating the sound quality on a 5-point scale of pleasantness. Study Sample: Twenty-one normal-hearing listeners with a range of musical backgrounds were recruited from the general public via flyers, by word of mouth, and from a database of volunteers maintained by the lab. Data Collection and Analysis: Results were analyzed using descriptive statistics, ANOVA, and t-tests with Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) for pairwise comparisons. Results: Listeners rated the most consonant samples as most pleasant and the most dissonant samples as least pleasant, as expected, with significant differences between the mean responses for each “tier” of harmonic consonance. Conclusions: A preliminary dataset of normal hearing listeners was collected for a novel music listening task focused on harmonic consonance-dissonance. The normal hearing cohort responded, as anticipated, with a monotonic relationship between reported pleasantness and the consonance of the 40 music samples. This task may be useful for researchers of hearing device technology, such as cochlear implants, to study fitting parameters that may impact music perception.