Reply to Goffinet: In consonance, old ideas die hard

Goffinet’s complaints (1) about our vocal similarity hypothesis (2) are unwarranted on both practical and theoretical grounds. First, the issue of tuning is a red herring. We used standard just intonation intervals to evaluate the consonance of chords because their role in music across historical and cultural boundaries is foundational (3). We limited the chords tested to combinations of the 12 intervals of the chromatic scale for practical reasons: additional ratios and/or tuning systems would have increased the chords that had to be evaluated to an unreasonable number. More generally, our results are unlikely to depend on a particular tuning system. The popular chords in our study … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed Email: dan.bowling{at}univie.ac.at. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1