Schellenberg E G, Trainor L J
Department of Psychology, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
J Acoust Soc Am. 1996 Nov;100(5):3321-8. doi: 10.1121/1.417355.
Two experiments examined the influence of sensory consonance on the perceptual similarity of simultaneous pairs of complex tones (harmonic intervals). In experiment 1, adults heard a sequence of five consonant intervals (each a perfect fifth, or 7 semitones) and judged whether a subsequently presented test interval was a member of the sequence. Discrimination performance was better when the test interval was dissonant (tritone, 6 semitones) rather than consonant (perfect fourth, 5 semitones), despite the fact that the change in interval width was twice as great for the consonant than for the dissonant comparison. In experiment 2, 7-month-old infants were tested with an operant headturn procedure in a similar design and exhibited an identical pattern of responding. Hence, for both age groups, consonance was more important than interval width in determining the perceived similarity of harmonic intervals.
两项实验研究了感官和谐对同时呈现的复杂音调对（和声间隔）感知相似性的影响。在实验1中，成年人听了一系列五个协和音程（每个都是纯五度，即7个半音），并判断随后呈现的测试音程是否是该序列的成员。尽管协和音程的音程宽度变化是不协和音程（三全音，6个半音）的两倍，但当测试音程不协和时，辨别表现更好，而不是协和音程（纯四度，5个半音）。在实验2中，7个月大的婴儿在类似的设计中接受了操作性转头程序测试，并表现出相同的反应模式。因此，对于这两个年龄组来说，在确定和声间隔的感知相似性时，和谐比音程宽度更重要。
