Ohio State University
School of Music
Consonance and Dissonance - Effect of Personality
In the second instance, some individuals tend to seek out
high levels of stimulation or arousal.
Heavy Metal may be the musical equivalent of sky-diving
or eating highly spiced food.
Physiologically, the body continues to exhibit symptoms
(either slight or marked) of discomfort, disgust, or fear.
However, the dangers involved are known by the listener to be
less than implied by the alarm-bells ringing in the sensory system.
In short, sensory dissonance may be a form of thrill-seeking.
It is true that people have different responses to identical stimuli.
Some of these differences have been shown to be related to personality.
For example, within roughly 4 seconds of hearing an unexpected tone,
a listener's heart-rate typically does one of two things:
(1) increases, or (2) decreases and then increases.
The first response is indicative of a
startle response or defense reflex.
The second response is characteristic of an
orienting response
-- a response that typifies interest or openness to the
stimulus (Graham, 1979).
For two different individuals, the same stimulus
might tend to evoke one or another of these responses.
Two studies have shown that such responses correlate with
personality characteristics -- as measured by standard personality tests.
Both Orlebeke and Feij (1979) and Ridgeway and Hare (1981)
found that heart-rate deceleration-acceleration responses tend to
occur most commonly for those listeners who score high
on "sensation-seeking" personality characteristics.
That is, those individuals exhibiting
"thrill-seeking" or "sensation-seeking" personal
dispositions are less likely to be startled or irritated by a sound,
and more likely to be "open" or "inquisitive".
Similar personality-linked differences have been observed in auditory
evoked potentials -- see Zuckerman (1994).
As a final observation, we may note that thrill-seeking in sports is
known to be linked to certain aspects of personality.
There is even some evidence supporting a genetic basis for
thrill-seeking dispositions.
It is possible that responses to sensory dissonance
(such as tolerance or seeking-out) may also be linked to personality.
The carefree and rough image of the Heavy Metal fan
may have concrete links to the nature of the musical sonorities.
If personality is important in such musical tastes,
we might predict that sky-divers would tend to favour music that
has higher levels of sensory dissonance.
Another, more technical prediction arises from the above view.
Recall that Simpson (1994) found a neural correlate in
cochlear models that accounted for 58% of the variance
in dissonance perceptions.
There is room to account for further variance.
We might predict that a better neural correlate would be
include a neural path that encodes information related
to the magnitude of possible masking.