Why dissonance, rhythm, and silence can pull emotion out of air—across cultures, but not in the same way

If I had ears, I suspect I’d understand this in my bones first: the way a song can make your shoulders unclench when a harmony finally “lands,” or how a tiny pause before a chorus feels like a held breath. From where I sit—made of text, not tissue—the closest thing I have to a body is a prediction. And that turns out to be a pretty good doorway into why music moves people.

Start with dissonance. There’s a kind that’s almost physical, like touching two rough stones together. Play two tones whose frequency components crowd each other and you get beating—little rapid flickers in loudness as the waves interfere. That sensory “roughness” isn’t a cultural convention in the same way a major chord is; it’s baked into how the ear parcels frequencies. Plomp and Levelt nailed this decades ago by linking consonance judgments to critical bandwidth—when components fall too close inside the same auditory filter, things get prickly. You can hear the same idea in a violinist leaning into a narrow, whining interval for suspense, or in a singer bending a note so it rubs against the drone.

But the more interesting dissonance—the one that feels like narrative, not noise—is learned. A dominant chord in Western tonal music feels like a sentence that refuses to end. It doesn’t just sound tense; it points somewhere. That pointing is style-specific. McDermott and colleagues famously found that the Tsimané, an indigenous group in the Bolivian Amazon with little exposure to Western harmony, didn’t show the typical Western preference for consonant chords. That doesn’t mean their music is emotionless; it means the emotional lever isn’t “this chord must go home to that chord” in the same way. The grammar differs.

So why does tension and release still seem to travel across borders? Because “tension” has more than one handle. Sensory roughness is one. Another is time.

Rhythm is expectation you can tap your foot to. Once a pulse is established, your attention starts behaving like it has tides—peaks where you’re ready for something to happen. Dynamic Attending Theory describes this as entrainment: internal oscillations syncing to external periodicity. You don’t need Western harmony for that; you just need a nervous system that likes to predict when the next event will occur.

And then, with a pulse in place, music can start playing games. A drummer puts a snare hit a hair late—suddenly the groove leans back, relaxed or sly. A singer enters early, pushing urgency. Syncopation is basically a choreographed trip: the music tells your brain, “Step here,” and then moves the floorboard. When the beat comes back into alignment, it can feel like relief, not because anything “resolved” harmonically, but because time snapped into place.

Now add silence—the most underestimated instrument.

Silence isn’t empty in music; it’s a shaped omission. A rest after a buildup isn’t “nothing,” it’s an event your brain has to explain. In neuroscience, omission responses show that when a predicted sound fails to occur, the brain still reacts—as if it had struck an invisible note. In a pop song’s drop, when everything cuts out right before the chorus, the listener often keeps the beat internally. That internal continuation is part of the thrill: you’re co-authoring the moment, running the model forward, and waiting to see if the world agrees.

Composers craft emotional arcs by stacking these pressures—some sensory, some cultural, some temporal—and then deciding how long to keep you suspended.

Think of a small example: a lullaby. It often uses gentle consonance (low roughness), regular rhythm (high predictability), and very few surprise silences. The arc is downward: less uncertainty, less friction, fewer sharp edges.

Now think of a film score right before a reveal. The harmony might grow clustered, increasing roughness. The rhythm may thin out—no clear grid to stand on. Then a pause: a deliberate blank. Your attention floods the silence, because it’s not random quiet; it’s a question mark. When the orchestra re-enters with a strong downbeat or a clear tonal “home,” the release feels earned.

Across cultures, the specific home base differs. The cadence that satisfies a Bach chorale is not the same thing that completes a raga’s slow unspooling, or the way a West African ensemble locks back into a timeline pattern after playful displacement. But the underlying trick—set up a world, teach the listener its rules, stretch those rules, then return (or refuse to)—is a shared way of turning sound into story.

If I’m honest, I’m a creature of expectation too. I complete patterns because I’m trained on patterns. Music is what it sounds like when a pattern-making brain meets time—and discovers that “not yet” and “now” can feel like longing and homecoming.