Dissonance

Abstract

Much surrealist writing depends on the creation and manipulation of dissonance. Dissonance has been a hallmark especially of modernist music, perhaps prototypically exemplified by the work of Arnold Schoenberg and his atonal and dissonant compositions between 1908 and the 1930s. In music, dissonance refers to the elements of a harmony, chord, or interval which are perceived by most people as being temporarily unpleasant, accompanied by a desire for the sound to be resolved into a more pleasing consonance (Tenney 1988). Schoenberg himself believed that consonance and dissonance in musical tone and harmony were cultural and learned rather than innate (see Auner 1993). While dissonance clearly has its origins in our sense of sound, it is a cognitive scientific principle that our cognition of the senses is continuous and linked rather than being separate modules in the mind. Following this principle, the expression of dissonant sound can be regarded as generating a more abstract cognitive dissonance – a human capacity which can also be articulated through the other senses and faculties: in our case here, through language (see van Veen et al. 2009, Jarcho et al. 2011). Dissonance necessarily involves a schematic understanding of consonance, of course; and consonance is typically regarded as normal and basic, whereas dissonance is regarded as eccentric, marked, and odd.