Although anecdotal and case-based research can provide an important source of hypotheses, the phenomenon of consonance and dissonance has developed a sufficient complexity that the only way forward is through careful experimentation. Here we will focus on evaluating different experiments.

Over the past century or so, a number of experiments have been carried out regarding consonance and dissonance. In making sense of these experiments, we might consider asking the following questions:

1. How many subjects were used?
2. What is the cultural background of the subjects?
3. Were the subjects musicians or non-musicians? Male or female?
4. Did the experiment use simple or complex tones? If simple tones were used, were they likely to have low distortion? If complex tones were used, is the spectral content well described? Did the experiment use complex non-harmonic tones?
5. Did the experiment use only tone diads? Or where triads and tetrads used?
6. Did the stimuli span a wide frequency range?
7. Was the effect of loudness measured?
8. If a wide frequency range was used, was there any attempt to compensation for threshold changes?
9. How did the subjects rate the stimuli? That is, what question were they asked?
10. Were the subjects' responses examined for reliability? Were test/retest correlations calculated?
11. How is the data presented? Do we see means only? Median values? Any indication of the data spread or variance?

• Notes Index
• Course Description
• Course Bibliography
• Course Index