The development of evaluative responses to music: Infants prefer to listen to consonance over dissonance

In Experiment 1, 6-month-old infants looked longer in order to listen to a set of consonant intervals than to a set of dissonant intervals. In Experiment 2, infants preferred to listen to the original version of a Mozart minuet than to a version altered to contain many dissonant intervals. Thus, although infants do not yet have the musical-system-specific knowledge of scale structure that is involved in adults' emotional reactions to music, infants are similar to adults in their evaluative reactions to consonance and dissonance.