Further study into Psychoacoustics has led me to Dissonant sounds. Not unlike Non linear sounds, dissonance in music can sound off or wrong to most people,
Dissonant music is the use of notes played together that are not considered tonal, and are generally disliked by the listeners. They are used hevaly in Horror genre
Arnold Schoenberg is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century; however his music generally makes people uncomfortable and for some is completely unlistenable.
Examples of Dissonance in Horror scores
The 'Hellraiser' theme music for example (Christopher Young, 1987)
In the 'Hellraiser' theme music there a subtle uses of dissonance, whereas in the original 'Friday the 13th' theme music, dissonance is used heavily throughout the entire score.
What I want to do if find out why most people find dissonant so unpleasing.
In modern times, dissonance has been widely believed to be the product of “beating”: interference between frequency components in the cochlea that has been believed to be more pronounced in dissonant than consonant sounds (minor seconds for example). However, harmonic frequency relations, a higher-order sound attribute closely related to pitch perception, has also been proposed to account for consonance.
Cognitive neuroscientist Marion Cousineau of the University of Montreal in Quebec and her colleagues evaluated these explanations for preferences about consonance and dissonance by comparing the responses of a control group of people with normal hearing to those of people with amusia — an inability to distinguish between different musical tones. ( https://www.pnas.org/content/109/48/19858 )
This is what the study reads in regard to the testing of people with amusia vs people with normally functioning hearing. "We assessed amusics preferences for musical chords as well as for the isolated acoustic properties of beating and harmonicity. In contrast to control subjects, amusic listeners showed no preference for consonance, rating the pleasantness of consonant chords no higher than that of dissonant chords. Amusics also failed to exhibit the normally observed preference for harmonic over inharmonic tones, nor could they discriminate such tones from each other. Despite these abnormalities, amusics exhibited normal preferences and discrimination for stimuli with and without beating"
Pairs of pure tones, either 0.75 or 1.5 semitones apart are frequency separations small enough that both tones fall within the same critical band when presented diotically, and thus produce a fair amount of beating.
This dislike in beating between amusics and people with full functioning heraring could be part of the reason on why dissonant sounds are perceived as unpleasant, as it is said to sound rough. this may also link to non linear sounds and work to put us on edge in a similar way.
References:
Marion Cousineau, Josh H. McDermott, and Isabelle Peretz (November 27, 2012) 'The basis of musical consonance as revealed by congenital amusia', PNAS, (), pp. 109.
Philip Ball (12 November 2012) Why dissonant music strikes the wrong chord in the brain, Available at: https://www.nature.com/news/why-dissonant-music-strikes-the-wrong-chord-in-the-brain-1.11791 (Accessed: 10 November 2019).
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