"The greek word 'harmonia' is not an essentially musical term: it simply means 'fitting together', and its root is the same as that of both 'arithmetic' and 'rhythm'.It implies a kind of numerical order."
- Philip Ball, 2010, The Music Instinct, London, Vintage.


Oxford dictionary definition of 'consance' and 'dissonance':

consonance in music - "a combination of notes which are in harmony with each other due to the relationship between their frequencies"

dissonance in music - "lack of harmony among musical notes"

"...these likes [consonances] and dislikes [dissonances] probably involve very little that is innate, but are rather mostly the products of learning."
- Philip Ball, 2010, The Music Instinct, London, Vintage.



What Philip Ball is depicting is the way we audit musical notes together can leed to varied views depending from which ever ones upbringing may be. Some puritan traditionalists are displeased with the notion of clashing cords. They think one must stick to the defined rules of note and cord correlation and sequencing. Examples such as Chopin, Mozart and Beethoven show mostly the use of tonal hierarchy. Some notes are naturally attracted to one another. But on the contrary Stockhausen, Debussy and Boulez cherished atonalism. As for when ethnomusicology proliferated at the end of the 20th century the battleground between tonalism and atonalism became for composers a cultural form of engaging music. The sensory dissonance is an interference of the acoustic waves due to the discrepancy of tonal frequencies.