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by cardamomo 4694 days ago
My co-worker's office phone is a real tritone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone). Considering that her desk is right next to mine, I find it incredibly jarring to hear that interval blaring in my ear whenever she gets a call.

...but in the end, I think you're right. I've been trained by Western music to think of the tritone as anxious or dissonant.

1 comments

Your anxiety at the tritone is not just a culturally learned response - as the Wikipedia article you linked explains, the harmonic ratios in a tritone really are mathematically 'dissonant' when compared to, say, a perfect fifth or major third.
A mathematical explanation of consonance and dissonance in music is appealing for its simplicity, but it is somewhat of a reductionist approach to understanding listeners' experience of music. There are many elements of the European musical tradition that, though they sound consonant to our ears, cannot be explained on mathematical grounds. The minor mode and the minor triad are notable examples. A more subtle and insidious case is that of equal temperament.

Background reading: "Musical Consonance and Dissonance: A Cultural Criterion" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/426253)