> Sethares extended this model to arbitrary sounds by decomposing them into their sine-wave partials with a Fourier transform and then taking an amplitude-weighted average of the predicted dissonance of each pair of partials.
This is not entirely fair to Plomp & Levelt: they were the first to consider a timbre as a set of sine-wave partials and do the pair-wise partial average. Sethares' extension was to consider inharmonic sine wave series and reason about the implied relationship between timbre and consonance.
As others have noted, I think that that "The ear does not care about ratios" is pushing the implications of Plomp & Levelt's and Sethares' work a little too far. They have made a convincing case that our experience of dissonance and consonance is based on a more complicated set of relationships that just the harmonic series, but it's still fundamentally all about ratios (just more of them, and they cannot be considered independent of each other). Even the P&L dissonance curve is in some senses a ratio plot.
This is not entirely fair to Plomp & Levelt: they were the first to consider a timbre as a set of sine-wave partials and do the pair-wise partial average. Sethares' extension was to consider inharmonic sine wave series and reason about the implied relationship between timbre and consonance.
As others have noted, I think that that "The ear does not care about ratios" is pushing the implications of Plomp & Levelt's and Sethares' work a little too far. They have made a convincing case that our experience of dissonance and consonance is based on a more complicated set of relationships that just the harmonic series, but it's still fundamentally all about ratios (just more of them, and they cannot be considered independent of each other). Even the P&L dissonance curve is in some senses a ratio plot.