T HE ORIGINS OF TONAL CONSONANCE—THE tendency to perceive some simultaneously sounded combinations of musical tones as more pleasant than others—is arguably among the most fundamental questions in music perception. For more than a century, the issue has been the subject of vigorous debate, undoubtedly fueled by the formidable complexities involved in investigating music-induced affective qualia that are not directly observable and often ineffable. The challenge of drawing definitive conclusions in this area of inquiry is well exemplified by the markedly divergent, yet equally thoughtful, responses offered in these commentaries. According to Bowling, our findings are an important source of converging evidence for his Vocal Similarity Hypothesis (VSH), the notion that consonance derives from an evolved preference for harmonic vocal sounds (Bowling, Purves, & Gill, 2018). However, he suggests that our interpretation of the results may cast a less favorable light on the VSH than is warranted. For example, he is skeptical of our contention that spectral interference (SI) accounts for greater variance in consonance judgments than harmonicity, arguing that the high correlation between these predictors ‘‘present[s] a problem for their separation via regression.’’ Yet, upon examination, the correlations between the harmonicity and SI measures that we used in our regression analyses were only moderate at best for our unconventional chord stimuli (-.54). Moreover, a Variance Inflation Factor analysis (Chatterjee & Price, 2012) for all four relevant regressions yields values under 1.26, close to their lower bound. This suggests that the precision of our regression coefficients was not likely to have been diminished due to multicollinearity. Our conclusion regarding the relative strength of the impact of SI on consonance ratings gains further credence from the work of Harrison and Pearce (2020), who reported analogous findings based on a reanalysis of four different behavioral datasets using conventional chords. Nevertheless, we agree with Bowling that consonance researchers should be wary of multicollinearity when comparing the predictive utility of different musical features, as certain harmonicity or SI metrics may indeed share substantial variance (see e.g., Bowling, this issue, Figure 2). Whereas Bowling suggests that our analysis and study design may have sold the VSH short by underweighting the contribution of harmonicity to consonance, both Smit and Milne as well as Harrison argue the opposite, proposing that we may have oversold the extent to which our findings support the VSH. Indeed, Harrison argues that our results leave open at least two alternative hypotheses: First, harmonicity may be preferred, not due to an evolved preference for voice-like sounds, but because harmonicity facilitates the identification of distinct auditory sources in the environment. Second, a preference for harmonic sounds may have evolved not because it reinforced attention to conspecific vocal communications (as posited by the VSH; Bowling et al., 2018), but because it reinforced social bonding via collective music making. Although critical details of these alternative accounts remain to be clarified, we agree that our results do not ‘‘support’’ the VSH in the strong sense of confirming it empirically. As we noted in our article, the primary goal of our study was to rule out the possibility that the association between consonance and harmonicity shown in Western chords was an artifact of familiarity. Our results suggest that this was unlikely to have been the case. In the absence of such evidence, the viability of the VSH would have been in grave doubt. In line with Harrison’s assessment, we concur that it will be enormously challenging to find ‘‘positive’’ evidence of an evolved preference for voice-like sounds, assuming it does exist (cf. McDermott, Schultz, Underraga, & Godoy, 2016). As noted by Bowling (this issue), ‘‘the auditory system receives harmonic stimulation from mother’s larynx as soon as it comes on-line,’’ making it difficult to determine whether a preference for harmonic chords derives from our evolutionary

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对“非常规调音系统中的谐音偏好”的特邀评论的回应

音调和声的起源——认为某些同时发声的音乐音调组合比其他音调更悦耳的倾向——可以说是音乐感知中最基本的问题之一。一个多世纪以来，这个问题一直是激烈辩论的主题，无疑是由于调查音乐诱发的情感感受所涉及的巨大复杂性，这些感受性感受是不可直接观察到的，而且通常是不可言喻的。这些评论中提供的明显不同但同样深思熟虑的回应很好地说明了在这一调查领域得出明确结论的挑战。根据 Bowling 的说法，我们的研究结果是他的声乐相似性假设 (VSH) 汇聚证据的重要来源，该假设认为和声源于对谐波人声的进化偏好（Bowling，Purves 和吉尔，2018 年）。然而，他认为我们对结果的解释可能对 VSH 的看法不如预期的那么好。例如，他对我们的论点表示怀疑，即频谱干扰 (SI) 在协和判断中的变化比谐波更大，认为这些预测因子之间的高度相关性“为通过回归分离它们带来了问题”。 ，经检查，我们在回归分析中使用的谐波和 SI 测量之间的相关性对于我们非常规的和弦刺激（-.54）至多只是适度的。此外，所有四个相关回归的方差通胀因子分析 (Chatterjee & Price, 2012) 得出的值均低于 1.26，接近其下限。这表明我们的回归系数的精度不太可能由于多重共线性而降低。我们关于 SI 对协和评级的影响的相对强度的结论从 Harrison 和 Pearce (2020) 的工作中获得了进一步的信任，他们报告了基于使用传统和弦对四个不同行为数据集进行重新分析的类似发现。尽管如此，我们同意 Bowling 的观点，即在比较不同音乐特征的预测效用时，协和研究人员应该警惕多重共线性，因为某些谐波或 SI 指标可能确实存在很大差异（例如，参见 Bowling，本期，图 2）。Bowling 认为，我们的分析和研究设计可能通过低估谐波对协和的贡献而卖空了 VSH，Smit 和 Milne 以及 Harrison 都提出了相反的观点，认为我们可能夸大了我们的研究结果支持 VSH 的程度。事实上，哈里森认为，我们的结果至少留下了两个可供选择的假设：首先，谐波可能是首选，这不是因为对类似语音的声音的进化偏好，而是因为谐波有助于识别环境中不同的听觉源。其次，对谐波声音的偏好可能已经演变，不是因为它加强了对特定声音交流的关注（如 VSH 所假设；Bowling 等人，2018 年），而是因为它通过集体音乐制作加强了社会联系。尽管这些替代账户的关键细节仍有待澄清，我们同意，我们的结果并不“支持”在经验上确认它的强烈意义上的 VSH。正如我们在文章中指出的那样，我们研究的主要目标是排除西方和弦中显示的和声与和声之间的关联是熟悉的产物的可能性。我们的结果表明，情况不太可能如此。在没有此类证据的情况下，VSH 的可行性将受到严重质疑。与哈里森的评估一致，我们同意，假设确实存在对类似声音的声音的进化偏好，找到“积极”证据将是巨大的挑战（参见 McDermott、Schultz、Underraga 和 Godoy，2016 年） . 正如 Bowling（本期）所指出的，“一旦上线，听觉系统就会收到来自母亲喉部的谐波刺激，