A recent study from the science publication Current Biology attempts to determine the basic neurological and cultural reasons why people think music sounds pleasant or not. If something sounds ...

A new theory suggests a natural basis for our preference for musical consonance. But does such a preference exist at all, wonders Philip Ball. What was avant-garde yesterday is often blandly ...

We conducted two studies to measure consonance preferences in populations with varying exposure to Western music. In Study 1, we measured preferences for sounds in residents of the United States and ...