1 3 Exp Brain Res DOI 10.1007/s00221-015-4233-9 RESEARCH ARTICLE (Dis-)Harmony in movement: effects of musical dissonance on movement timing and form Naeem Komeilipoor · Matthew W. M. Rodger · Cathy M. Craig · Paola Cesari Received: 14 October 2014 / Accepted: 14 February 2015 © The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Introduction We interact with our environment through movement; with the way we move being influenced by many different types of perceptual information. For instance, environmen- tal sounds carry an ecological significance that allows us to move in the direction of an object, detect the presence of objects, interact with others and even interpret events using sound alone (Gaver 1993; Carello et al. 2005). One of the key ways in which humans naturally interact with their auditory environment is when they synchronize their movements to regular patterns of sound (e.g., dancing to a beat). Indeed, to be able to synchronize movements to sounds, an activity humans are very skilled at, the nerv- ous system must pick up information from the auditory perceptual stream about the time until the next beat sounds and use this information to prospectively guide the genera- tion of consecutive actions (Craig et al. 2005). Given the absence of a continuous source of external temporal infor- mation to guide the action extrinsically, the nervous system must create its own source of dynamic temporal informa- tion (Tau-G, Craig et al. 2005). It has already been shown that the structure of sound events (discrete vs. continuous) can affect the processes by which movements are timed to sounds, even if the interval durations are the same (Rodger and Craig 2011, 2013). Although synchronization of body movement to the perceived musical tempo has been widely studied (see Repp and Su 2013, for a review), the effects of other aspects of auditory stimuli on movement–sound synchronization, such as musical pitch relationships, have largely been neglected. Synchronizing movements with musical rhythms is indeed one of the most natural and instinctive ways in which humans interact with their auditory environment. The inex- tricable link between sound and movement forms the basis Abstract While the origins of consonance and dissonance in terms of acoustics, psychoacoustics and physiology have been debated for centuries, their plausible effects on move- ment synchronization have largely been ignored. The pre- sent study aimed to address this by investigating whether, and if so how, consonant/dissonant pitch intervals affect the spatiotemporal properties of regular reciprocal aiming movements. We compared movements synchronized either to consonant or to dissonant sounds and showed that they were differentially influenced by the degree of consonance of the sound presented. Interestingly, the difference was present after the sound stimulus was removed. In this case, the performance measured after consonant sound exposure was found to be more stable and accurate, with a higher percentage of information/movement coupling (tau cou- pling) and a higher degree of movement circularity when compared to performance measured after the exposure to dissonant sounds. We infer that the neural resonance rep- resenting consonant tones leads to finer perception/action coupling which in turn may help explain the prevailing preference for these types of tones. Keywords Consonance dissonance sounds · Musical pitch intervals · Sensorimotor synchronization N. Komeilipoor (*) · P. Cesari Department of Neurological and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Via Casorati 43, 37131 Verona, Italy e-mail: naeem.komeilipoor@univr.it N. Komeilipoor MOVE Research Institute, VU University Amsterdam, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands M. W. M. Rodger · C. M. Craig School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, David Keir Building, 18-30 Malone Road, Belfast BT9 5BN, UK