Originally Posted by dcuny
That means the ear, not the neural processing.
Wrong.

You are not understanding basic biology and the Bidelman paper.

The brainstem is packed with neurons. And their activity is “well correlated” with consonance according to the findings. You actually bold-faced the section of the conclusion that addresses this.

They say “Brainstem responses are well correlated with the ordering of consonance obtained behaviorally . . .”
What does this mean? It means that observed brainstem (neural activity) responses correlated well with consonance. This is talking about neural activity, not air pressure to electrical signal transduction in the ear. This brainstem activity is happening downstream of the ear.

Then they say “. . . suggesting that a listener's judgment of pleasant- or unpleasant-sounding music may be rooted in low-level sensory processing.”
What does “low-level sensory processing” mean? It means that the processing is taking place downstream of the ear and in the brainstem.

Obviously, the various parts of the ear are crucial to hearing. These are all subsystems of the overall auditory system. But the ear is primarily a transducer. The heavy-lift processing takes place in the brain and in the brainstem. That is what brains do.

Maybe a description of the division of labor and diagrams will help you understand this better.
1. Outer Ear collects sound waves
2. Middle Ear amplifies vibrations
3. Inner Ear breaks down sound into frequency components
4. Brainstem is responsible for early central processing with phase-locking neurons for consonance detection
5. Auditory Cortex and Memory regions aid in music interpretation and recollection.

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