This paper explores the impact of timbre on musical consonance through a series of large-scale behavioral studies involving 235,440 human judgments from US and South Korean participants. The traditional belief that consonance is derived from simple harmonic frequency ratios and is independent of timbre is challenged by the findings. The study demonstrates that harmonic consonance preferences can be significantly influenced by timbral manipulations, even leading to preferences for inharmonic intervals. Through computational modeling, the researchers show that these timbral manipulations dissociate competing psychoacoustic mechanisms underlying consonance, leading to an updated model that combines liking of harmonicity, disliking of fast beats (roughness), and liking of slow beats. The results suggest that timbre plays a crucial role in shaping consonance perception and provide insights into the perceptual origins of diverse scale systems, from the gamelan's slendro scale to Western mean-tone and equal-tempered scales. The study highlights the importance of large-scale behavioral experiments in advancing our understanding of auditory perception and musical cognition.This paper explores the impact of timbre on musical consonance through a series of large-scale behavioral studies involving 235,440 human judgments from US and South Korean participants. The traditional belief that consonance is derived from simple harmonic frequency ratios and is independent of timbre is challenged by the findings. The study demonstrates that harmonic consonance preferences can be significantly influenced by timbral manipulations, even leading to preferences for inharmonic intervals. Through computational modeling, the researchers show that these timbral manipulations dissociate competing psychoacoustic mechanisms underlying consonance, leading to an updated model that combines liking of harmonicity, disliking of fast beats (roughness), and liking of slow beats. The results suggest that timbre plays a crucial role in shaping consonance perception and provide insights into the perceptual origins of diverse scale systems, from the gamelan's slendro scale to Western mean-tone and equal-tempered scales. The study highlights the importance of large-scale behavioral experiments in advancing our understanding of auditory perception and musical cognition.