Harmony Perception by Periodicity Detection

The perception of consonance/dissonance of musical harmonies is strongly correlated to their periodicity. This is shown in this article by consistently applying recent results from psychophysics and neuroacoustics, namely that the just noticeable difference of human pitch perception is about 1% for the musically important low frequency range and that periodicities of complex chords can be detected in the human brain. The presented results correlate significantly to empirical investigations on the perception of chords. Even for scales, plausible results are obtained. For example, all classical church modes appear in the front ranks of all theoretically possible seven-tone scales.