I discuss three fundamental questions underpinning the study of consonance: 1) What features cause a particular chord to be perceived as consonant? 2) How did humans evolve the ability to perceive these features? 3) Why did humans evolve to attribute particular aesthetic valences to these features (if they did at all)? The first question has been addressed by several recent articles, including Friedman, Kowalewski, Vuvan, and Neill (2021), with the common conclusion that consonance in Western listeners is driven by multiple features such as harmonicity, interference between partials, and familiarity. On this basis, it seems relatively straightforward to answer the second question: each of these consonance features seems to be grounded in fundamental aspects of human auditory perception, such as auditory scene analysis and auditory long-term memory. However, the third question is harder to resolve. I describe several potential answers, and argue that the present evidence is insufficient to distinguish between them, despite what has been claimed in the literature. I conclude by discussing what kinds of future studies might be able to shed light on this problem.

中文翻译：

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关于协和感知的三个问题

我讨论了支持和弦研究的三个基本问题：1）什么特征导致特定和弦被认为是辅音？2）人类是如何进化出感知这些特征的能力的？3）为什么人类进化到将特定的审美价值归因于这些特征（如果他们有的话）？第一个问题已在最近的几篇文章中得到解决，包括 Friedman、Kowalewski、Vuvan 和 Neill (2021)，他们的共同结论是西方听众的共鸣是由多种特征驱动的，例如谐波、分音之间的干扰和熟悉度。在此基础上，回答第二个问题似乎相对简单：这些协和特征中的每一个似乎都基于人类听觉感知的基本方面，例如听觉场景分析和听觉长期记忆。然而，第三个问题更难解决。我描述了几个可能的答案，并认为目前的证据不足以区分它们，尽管文献中已经声称。最后，我讨论了哪些类型的未来研究可能能够阐明这个问题。