Dissonance has several meanings, all related to conflict or incongruity:
- Consonance and dissonance in music are properties of an interval or chord
- Cognitive dissonance is a state of mental conflict
- Dissonance in poetry is the deliberate avoidance of assonance, i.e. patterns of repeated vowel sounds. Dissonance in poetry is similar to cacophony and the opposite of euphony.
- Dissonance (album), a 2009 album by Enuff Z'Nuff
- Dissonance (music), the quality of a discord
Famous quotes containing the word dissonance:
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)
“English audiences of working people are like an instrument that responds to the player. Thought ripples up and down them, and if in some heart the speaker strikes a dissonance there is a swift answer. Always the voice speaks from gallery or pit, the terrible voice which detaches itself in every English crowd, full of caustic wit, full of irony or, maybe, approval.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“For decades child development experts have erroneously directed parents to sing with one voice, a unison chorus of values, politics, disciplinary and loving styles. But duets have greater harmonic possibilities and are more interesting to listen to, so long as cacophony or dissonance remains at acceptable levels.”
—Kyle D. Pruett (20th century)