In the following I shall use dissonance as a shorthand for consonance and dissonance , thereby implying that consonance is simply the absence of dissonance.  (An assumption that you are invited to question if you don't share it.) We have had a number of discussions about dissonance on this group, but I suspect that most of it proceeds from a rather vague, visceral idea of dissonance.  To make this point clearer, consider the following series:     minor second tritone major third perfect fifth Most of us would agree that there is increasing dissonance from right to left in this series, but can we define the dissonance thus referred to in a functional way?  For the sake of the argument suppose that we know common practice classical music and that we are ignorant of all other forms of music.  We can then say that minor seconds and tritones are dissonant in the sense that we cannot end a piece with a chord containing these intervals.  But can we find a similar contextual way to express the idea that minor seconds are *more* dissonant than tritones? Or that perfect fifths are *less* dissonant than major thirds? We can certainly find corroboration for these assumptions by conducting tests where 99.9% of the respondents say the minor second is rougher than the tritone.  But as a *definition*, this tells us little more than the classic definition of IQ, namely that IQ is what you measure with an IQ test.  There is probably some connection between intelligence and IQ , but we cannot tell what it is as long as we define these concepts in terms of each other - likewise with roughness versus dissonance . Another way to go about it is the hypothetical-deductive method.  We determine the dissonance of intervals according to our pet theory and then compare this against people's idea of dissonance.  And there is surely a wealth of historical material to draw upon for such sampling. But the procedure is not wholly satisfactory.  Take for instance the 2nd inversion triad G-C-E.  It is nominally dissonant because it needs to be resolved, but is it dissonant in the same way that a minor second is dissonant?  How can we tell? It seems to me that we have a problem of methodology here.  If we have no definition of dissonance other than that provided by our pet theory, how can we know that the different pet theories address the same type of dissonance? Or maybe the problem is that I am confused, as Silverman says.

What about indian or japanese scales? They are dissonant for us, but are they for these folks? We say a minor second is dissonant. If you don't hear the whole scale, you can't say it's a minor second. It could as well be the step between the seventh and eighth tone of the major scale, which seems less dissonant for us. I think it depends on your musical habit. The indian may think of our scales as dissonant.

We say a minor second is dissonant. If you don't hear the whole scale, you can't say it's a minor second. It could as well be the step between the seventh and eighth tone of the major scale, which seems less dissonant for us. The semiton step between the 7th and 8th notes of the major scale IS a minor second interval. Dissonance is to do with what happens when you play the two notes together - there's a certain argumenent over the precise meaning of the word in different contexts,  but I haven't heard ANYONE say that a minor 2nd is consonant Dave Dave Webber Author of MOZART the Music Processor for Windows - http://www.mozart.co.uk Member of the Association of Shareware Professionals http://asp-shareware.org Member of the North Cheshire Concert Band http://members.aol.com/northchesh

A rather quick & shallow response to a very considered post, sorry; * As a composer, I don't find the concepts of consonance & dissonance useful in any way; it's not something I find relevant to think about while writing. * As a teacher, I try to undermine the use of these terms as much as possible. Extract from a response I made to a draft syllabus; Here's a radical idea; don't mention the words consonant and dissonant at all. These concepts are seriously value laden, culturally & historically determined & relative. But what tends to get into the student's (lecturer's!) minds is this;      Consonant            Dissonant      

* As a composer, I don't find the concepts of consonance & dissonance useful in any way; it's not something I find relevant to think about while writing. How about the concepts of tension and release? They seem pretty critical at least to most Western music, and the movement from (relative) dissonance to consonance is a very common means of attaining the feeling of tension and release. The primary issue generating discussion in the newsgroups may be primarily that some people mistake dissonance and consonance as the only technique available for achieving tension and release, but there are other ways to move a piece forward than just V7-I. Or it may be that some people speak of dissonance in absolutes (wanting some measurement that says the minor second is 95% dissonant while the tritone is 85% dissonant ) while the relevance of dissonance in actual music is entirely relative to the context of the piece (this chord is more dissonant than the next chord, therefore we have some release of tension). And yes, I do know there's more contributing to harmonic tension and release than relative dissonance.