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triMichael 2 days ago [-]
I've had a theory for a while now that music is related to Kolmogorov complexity, or in other words how compressible it is. Random noise that we find unpleasant is very incompressible. On the other hand, simple sound patterns that we find boring such as Do Re Mi is very compressible. What we call music sits in the middle, and is maximizing the amount of signal. In this way, we can view humans as information seeking machines, which is why we like music.
LEDThereBeLight 2 days ago [-]
It is this way with all art. If you ask someone to describe a work which is “good art” or “well designed”, it usually takes longer to describe than things which are considered too simple (easily compressed) and also longer to describe than things which are considered too random (easily compressed). But not all things which take this Goldilocks amount of words to describe are considered well designed, just some of them. So art is also more than that.
satvikpendem 1 days ago [-]
How does this handle modern art which is very incompressible too? If we take your hypothesis then one could say modern art isn't good, which some do say.
mapontosevenths 1 days ago [-]
There are things that can not be expressed in words, but which can still be expressed. Some of modern art lives within that gap.
Even traditional art often tries to do more than compress concepts, it tries to express the inexpressible.
Linguistic determinism/relativity (Sapir-Worf, etc) explains some of it. People can FEEL that their thoughts are being constrained by language, but they don't know how to express that and maybe don't even consciously realize that it's their real problem. They just figure out that art makes it feel a little better so they do art.
otabdeveloper4 24 hours ago [-]
Yes, modern art is literal trash with no redeemable qualities.
amanaplanacanal 22 hours ago [-]
You no like van Gogh?
throw7488578 20 hours ago [-]
Van Gogh lived in the XIX century. How many centuries must pass before we stop calling that modern? What words should we use for things which are actually modern?
amanaplanacanal 19 hours ago [-]
Modern art is a technical term in art history. Maybe 20th century art? But even then I'll bet people can find something made in the 20th century they like. Maybe they'll have to give us more info about what they mean by "modern art".
I know that. I’m arguing the term is dumb, since it waters down the natural meaning of words, making it harder to communicate effectively. Art historians should come up with a different, more specific term.
rcxdude 17 hours ago [-]
Art historians are the ones who invented the term. Arguably it's everyone else who has tried to redefine it into something else.
LocalH 7 hours ago [-]
Art historians invented the word “modern”?
jhbadger 4 hours ago [-]
If anything, art history defines "modern" later than the real historical meaning ("modern art" starts in the 1860s after the invention of photography). In history modernity starts in the 1500s - in Western culture history is divided into ancient (dawn of civilization to fall of Rome), medieval (fall of Rome to the Renaissance) and modern (Renaissance to now). You'd need a fall of civilization or something to justify a new era.
scarecrowbob 17 hours ago [-]
One thing I have found in playing a lot of jazz off of lead sheets is that while you can really play some deep and idiomatic music in all the jazz forms, it's almost impossible to recreate much of modern rock by compressing it to a lead sheet.
Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.
Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".
And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.
What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.
With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.
I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.
But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).
While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.
My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.
Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.
With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.
Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.
But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.
So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.
So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.
tsimionescu 1 days ago [-]
While this might explain certain aspects of music, it doesn't explain the strong emotional reaction that music produces, even without lyrics. Kolmogorov complexity can't explain why Ode to Joy evokes so different feelings from Requiem, and why these feelings generally persist if you play the same notes with the same timings on very different instruments.
andoando 18 hours ago [-]
Theres a simple explanation! Our brains recognize these patterns in everyday life and thus associate them to certain events weve experienced that employed the same or similar patterns of thinking
A fast BPM song alone would be indicative of events where things are happening fast and quickly.
grumbel 6 minutes ago [-]
While true to some degree, it's also an extremely loose connection.
When I see a picture on a computer screen, it evokes similar emotions as seeing the real thing, since the light that ends up on my retina is very similar, even so other aspects of the sensory input might be missing.
Music on the other side doesn't really have a natural analog. Nature is mostly just wind and water noises, with a bit of bird song and chirping crickets. The only thing they have in common with music is that they are all sounds, but the structure and complexity is quite different.
Music as an offshoot from pre-language communication seems more likely, it could explain the emotional component at least, since groups of animals might need to sync their emotional state. But even there you end up with quite a big leap between what sounds happen naturally and what we call music.
Compression requires prediction, and good music seems to require a balance between predictability (repetition) and novelty. This can be seen in even the simplest (verse/chorus) song structure.
rererereferred 19 hours ago [-]
And I guess this is why I don't like Free Jazz. It sits close to the random noise side of the spectrum. I guess other people can feel the patterns in it.
scarecrowbob 17 hours ago [-]
I play quite a lot of jazz, among other things. On several instruments, mostly clarinet lately by I've performed with bands large and small on piano and upright bass.
Having participated in a lot of free improv music (one of my cohort has a grammy related to it), I am not sure if there really are a lot of patterns going on there. I am not a fan and it doesn't feel fun for me in the way that sitting with a band and playing Django-style music ("Tears" or "Swing 42" or "September Song").
I don't think it's a noise thing, I think there just isn't much "signal" getting compressed so the decoders are doing way more than they should.
andoando 15 hours ago [-]
There definitely are patterns to it! It may just be alot of patterns shifting intensely that the thing as a whole doesn't feel rhythmic
scarecrowbob 11 hours ago [-]
There are, and occasionally I have heard them.
I suspect, though, that many of those patterns are inaccessible by an audience, or even the other musicians. Or sometimes to the person performing said patterns.
4dregress 1 days ago [-]
Add in that it only works for us in conditions that approximate Earths atmosphere.
If you could hear music on the surface of Mars without a space suit, I’m pretty sure it would sound quite different.
tsimionescu 1 days ago [-]
Musical notes are pretty well defined sound frequencies. The medium which carries that sound wave is irrelevant. You can even get yourself a pair of bone conduction headphones, which would work for listening to music even if you were in a vacuum - since ultimately what matters is the sound wave hitting your ear bones, thr air is just the most common way for it to happen.
Of course, the sound that non-electrical instruments make is indeed dependent on the atmosphere in which they are played, assuming the same motions etc. You could probably make a violin produce the exact same sounds that it does on Earth playing it on Mars, but you'd have to play it differently than you do here. But even this doesn't apply to electrical instruments - Jimi Hendrix would sound the same if he could somehow play on the surface of Mars.
mettamage 1 days ago [-]
The longer I live, the more I feel air and water are similar in that regard. Fish live in water, we live in air which is less sticky. If air was stickier, more species could fly since flying and swimming are basically similar things but water molecules seem to pack tighter (that’s my guess at least) so when you displace it, you can generate a force (e.g. by flapping).
In that sense, I think any form of atmosphere, it will have its own music but it would probably not sound great in other atmospheres.
tsimionescu 1 days ago [-]
There are some fundamental differences between liquids like water and gases like the air, they're not a continuum - moving from a liquid state to a gaseous state is a phase change, and comes with a huge, and measurable, energy cost (getting 1 kg of liquid water from 0C to 100C takes as much energy as converting that water entirely into water gas at 100C). Note that evaporation is different - it's just tiny bits of liquid water flying away.
Also, any atmosphere can carry any sound wave for at least some distance. It takes more or less energy to do so, and if the medium attenuates rapidly, you have to start with higher frequencies so that the right frequency reaches your audience, but that's it. You need different instruments to play in different atmospheres, sure, but not different music. And electrical instruments actually work exactly the same regardless of the medium.
VorpalWay 1 days ago [-]
The term you are looking for is viscosity. Water has higher viscosity than air. Honey and syrup even higher still. It basically describes how "thick" the medium is, or to be a bit more precise, how much it resists forces applied to it.
comrade1234 2 days ago [-]
That doesn't really explain the popularity at times of clicks-and-beeps music and some other modern music.
peterlk 1 days ago [-]
Sure it does! The listeners of such music have listened to lots of other music, and have developed a mental model of it that is overly predictive (too compressible) to be interesting to the information-seeking machine.
It is also possible that people are listening to the music for reasons other than the music itself (community, feelings of superiority, etc.)
detourdog 1 days ago [-]
A thing it’s simple patterning. Listen to the same random music on a cd and it becomes a pattern. The more discernible the pattern the more popular the music.
wyre 1 days ago [-]
When you say clicks-and-beeps are you talking about music like Skrillex, Alva Noto, Aphex Twin or do you mean something else?
Either way, it sure does explain the popularity. If you consider it as predictability instead of compression, it might make more sense. Listeners have an expectation on what music sounds like and popular music is going to ride that line between the listeners expectations and something more original and stray from those expectations.
I think this could also be why AI music is so bad, because it can hit the listener's expectations, but the ways that it strays from them are seemingly random, which is why a big reason to why it is so uncanny.
tsimionescu 1 days ago [-]
I imagine they might mean more like either early video game music (the kind produced by the same synthesizer the BIOS uses to emit beeps) and the style that mimics that, or extreme minimalism experiments in various musical disciplines.
xhevahir 2 days ago [-]
I don't know. I'm inclined to think that it's more visceral. At least a good part of its appeal, and the oldest. There's the famous example of slaughterhouses using calm, predictable music and consonant harmonies to calm their animals.
dist-epoch 2 days ago [-]
I've read a paper which had a similar theory - music is a reward hack for the brain - the brain is a prediction machine, and it gets rewarded when it correctly predicts stuff. Music is highly predictable due to it's rhythmic mathematical structure, thus very easy to predict, with a lot of content to predict (hundreds of events per minute) thus you get a lot of reward from it.
As an example, EDM music is highly predictable, and highly popular.
African tribal drum music is also highly predictable, while also being complex in poly-rhythmic ways.
skinfaxi 2 days ago [-]
Interesting. I think there is a relationship to expectations/predictability but we also enjoy subversion of those expectations like syncopation in a second verse or bridges, etc.
1718627440 2 days ago [-]
> and it gets rewarded when it correctly predicts stuff.
Yet it's way more fun if the music evolves and takes twists you don't expected. I actually get quite aggressive from to predictable music, basically most modern pop music, but I guess that's highly subjective. For me good music must be intellectual exhaustive.
PaulDavisThe1st 2 days ago [-]
as my drummer friend put it often "Entrainment, not entrancing"
RationPhantoms 2 days ago [-]
And then there is whatever copulation the Jazz players are doing with their saxophones.
xpct 1 days ago [-]
Hmm. I wonder if that can say anything about an individual's brain. That is, what type if people like the rhythmicity?
jacquesm 2 days ago [-]
I once read a book that tried to express this as a fractal dimension. I really don't remember the name of the book though.
vor_ 2 days ago [-]
You mean you have a hypothesis. :) A theory is an entire body of facts and experiments.
aldanor 2 days ago [-]
"3. a speculative or conjectural view or idea"
(Collins dictionary, noun 'theory')
dotancohen 1 days ago [-]
I would say they his theory is quite supported by my own experience - which is a form of ad hoc experiment.
jug 1 days ago [-]
Surely only in the specific meaning of "scientific theory"? E.g theory of gravity.
augment_me 2 days ago [-]
Isn't the easier explanation that music/sound/rhythms has a social function for much of human history, and since humans are social creatures, we find safety and meaning in such sounds?
jerjerjer 20 hours ago [-]
Doesn't have to be social to be enjoyed though.
andai 2 days ago [-]
The article mentioned this study:
The minor third communicates sadness in speech, mirroring its use in music
This reminded me of how I keep hearing that major doesn't really sound happy, and minor doesn't really sound sad, it's purely cultural. (But Bouba does really sound round... :)
That doesn't sound right to me, but in that case maybe the speech thing is cultural too? It would be interesting to test it in other cultures. (Preferably ones that haven't been exposed to western music, if there still is such a thing!)
otabdeveloper4 24 hours ago [-]
Rock and metal bangers are all in minor, and they're certainly not "sad".
recursive 2 days ago [-]
Otherwise unspecified "major chords" are generally assumed to be major triads, and thus not tetrachords at all, which require four notes. I tried finding this section in the sources, but I couldn't find it. I wonder what's meant by this. Could it really mean that major triads are less pleasant than all tetrachords? That's surprising, since many tetrachords contain major triads.
> Major chords (which is what people who grew up hearing Western music tend to rate as positive), the Kalash instead describe as “strange,” rating them as less pleasant to listen to than “the most dissonant [of] all the possible tetrachords possible within the octave”.
zahlman 2 days ago [-]
"Tetrachord" typically refers to a series of four notes separated by a perfect fourth, not simultaneous notes, coming out of the music theory of the ancient Greeks. Although that may not be the intended meaning here.
The quote is not calling a major chords a tetrachord; it's comparing major chords to the set of tetrachords (whatever the quoted person has in mind; the linked paper isn't immediately accessible to me), despite not being a member.
recursive 2 days ago [-]
Well, that doesn't make any sense either, as major chords don't have any perfect fourths in them either, unless you count the interval between the fifth degree and the tonic in an inversion.
For the harmonic convention of chords based on stacked fourths, I've always heard it called "quartal" harmony, but my knowledge doesn't go very deep there.
In any case, wikipedia disagrees.
> In music theory, a tetrachord (Greek: τετράχορδoν; Latin: tetrachordum) is a series of four notes separated by three intervals
moefh 1 days ago [-]
I think you misunderstood the comment you're replying to.
They meant (like Wikipedia says) that traditionally a tetrachord spans a perfect fourth (i.e., that's the interval between the first and last notes), not that it's a stack of perfect fourths.
As to the original point, any discussion about dissonance of chords is meaningless without mention of temperament: in the modern tuning system (equal temperament[1]) both major and minor triads are pretty dissonant, look at the thirds at the table in the section named "Comparison with just intonation" in that Wikipedia page.
We have been dealing with the tension between keeping thirds and fifths pleasant for centuries: very roughly, people used meantone temperaments[2] in the Renaissance (which had perfectly tuned thirds), then came the era of well temperament[3], and eventually we settled for the simpler equal temperament we use today with its nasty thirds (it has several other advantages, but "having pleasant major and minor triads" is not one of them).
It's explained in the article, but I want to emphasize that "well temperament" was not a single thing, but various separate attempts at compromise. Bach wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier seemingly to celebrate the idea of tunings that sound acceptable in every key (without the wolf fifths of meantone temperaments), but it's not at all clear what specific tuning he had in mind, if any:
> During much of the 20th century it was presumed, possibly mistakenly, that Bach intended equal temperament, which after Bach's death became popular as the standard keyboard tuning, and had been described by theorists and musicians for at least a century before Bach's birth. Accounts of Bach's own tuning practice are few and inexact. …Despite the presumption of equal temperament, research has continued into various unequal systems contemporary with Bach's career; there is debate whether Bach might have meant a range of similar temperaments, perhaps altered slightly in practice from piece to piece, or possibly some single, specific, "well-tempered" solution for all purposes…
Personally, while I know on some academic level that our 12edo minor and major thirds are off by something like 14 cents, they don't sound unpleasant to me. I think it takes a specific sort of ear training to become really, er, attuned to purely consonant intervals and to notice dissonance on that level (which only produces real clashes in the higher harmonics).
olelele 1 days ago [-]
Sveriges Radio provides a flac stream of the station mentioned in this piece.
i, like the author, tend to find the theories of how/why music works unsatisfactory. in a sense, it has to be some kind of side-effect of capabilities that evolved via natural selection, but i find explanations for visual art operating that way more satisfying than music operating that way. music seems to be better analogized to the written word. we can engage with the written word "visually" (eg graffiti) but most of the time we don't quite do that -- what we do (stare at pieces of paper with funny squiggles in them and hallucinate) is far more abstract. music seems to be like that, too.
CGMthrowaway 2 days ago [-]
Why is a murmuration of starlings so pleasing to watch?
Over a couple of years, I applied to a couple dozen CS grad programs with an admissions essay about music, AI, and CS.
The academy doesn’t give a sh*t. Nothing but rejections across the board.
How did it reach a point where doctors of philosophy don’t want anything to do with deeper mysteries?
from_memory 1 days ago [-]
I think typically you need to apply somewhere where there is a professor (mentoring grad students) who specializes in, or does research in, the field your proposed thesis is in. You said you applied to a couple dozen programs, that seems very high to me. Was this spaced out over time, or did you do a bulk dump after graduation? The application fees alone are unpleasant to think about. How were your GREs?
mintflow 2 days ago [-]
The article reminds me a Chinese music which strike me one day when I just find it on youtube music
Cann't say something more, but it just made me a bit sad, and feel some nostalgia, and find how times flies over the years
This first song is pretty western for Chinese music even if it is made by someone from China, which I am assuming it is I have no idea. Also this playslist has a lot of non-Chinese music in it, there's a Final Fantasy song for example, and likely quite a bit of AI generated music. I am not an expert in Chinese music but this doesn't seem very representative. I have a feeling this playlist makes you feel those ways because that was the feeling the person who put this together was going for, it just happens to have some songs from Chinese artists and was probably put together by someone who is Chinese.
generic92034 2 days ago [-]
It does not seem to be traditional Chinese music, at least. Or at least my understanding was that the major-minor tonality you can hear in the linked piece did not play a (any?) role in traditional Chinese music.
amatecha 2 days ago [-]
That was really good! Thanks for sharing. <3
bob1029 2 days ago [-]
It's probably something around the idea of an external oscillator influencing the one in our heads.
"Rumi, the great poet of Persia, often speaks about the ney and his great work Masnavi opens with the words “listen to the ney”. He says the pains and sorrows the soul experiences through life are like holes made in a reed flute, and it is by making these holes that a player makes the flute out of a reed. This means that the heart of man is first a reed and the sufferings and pains it goes through make it a flute which can then be used by God as the instrument for the music that He constantly wishes to produce. It was on the model of the heart of man that the first musical instrument was made, and no earthly instrument can produce that music which the heart produces, raising the mortal soul to immortality."
Trying to explain why music is magical risks killing it with words. A lot of things are best left unspoken.
jjulius 2 days ago [-]
I don't know that it risks killing it, but I generally agree with your sentiment. Why can't we just be satisfied with the fact that we enjoy it? Why do we need an explanation for everything? We've removed so much mystery and awe from the every day already...
vor_ 1 days ago [-]
Respectfully, I find your sentiment baffling. For me, knowing more about something enhances its value.
xpct 1 days ago [-]
I proudly stand in the 'interesting as long as I don't understand it' camp!
Foobar8568 2 days ago [-]
Well don't read anything related to music analysis, or something I discovered this week https://cklixx.people.wm.edu/teaching/math400/Chris.pdf
or for some books : "Exploring Musical Spaces. A Synthesis of Mathematical Approaches" or "Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformation"
temp0826 2 days ago [-]
Knowing why I want to headbang isn't going to stop me from headbanging in the moment
embedding-shape 2 days ago [-]
Some people find beauty in the explanations and understanding too, Feynman being a very famous example of this.
virgil_disgr4ce 2 days ago [-]
Explain how anything could in any way "kill music."
1718627440 2 days ago [-]
I don't really experience it with music, because there it just makes me understand it better and create it, but I used to like reading before we started dissecting it in school, so I can see how it can be similar for people with other pleasurable experiences, like music or a painting.
2 days ago [-]
joquarky 1 days ago [-]
I'm convinced that music and spoken language are closely related.
unixhero 2 days ago [-]
I think music when enjoyed triggers the brain to go into a different thinking mode.
skc 2 days ago [-]
I like to wonder if there are alien civilizations out there with no music or art.
lisper 2 days ago [-]
There are such civilizations here on earth: ants. Termites. Honey bees.
alanbernstein 2 days ago [-]
If you squint hard enough, you might see the music/art directly in the structure of their civilizations
lisper 2 days ago [-]
The question is: do the bees see music and art in their structures. I doubt it. One of the defining characteristics of music and art is that they have no obvious direct connection to reproductive fitness.
block_dagger 1 days ago [-]
Maybe it's not an obvious direct connection, but in general good artists seem to get more action than the average person.
PaulDavisThe1st 2 days ago [-]
Once you understand the role of happy in positive reproductive outcomes (long term, not pre- or immediately post-natal, their role is fairly obvious.
sdeframond 2 days ago [-]
Hmm, what does "civilization" mean actually?
2 days ago [-]
adrianmonk 2 days ago [-]
Hondo.
That's part of the premise of the movie "The History of Future Folk".
To appreciate music and art you need a sense of harmony. An alien species with aversion to harmony would produce similarly disgusting civilization: its music will be noise and its art will be chaos.
wry_discontent 2 days ago [-]
This was really interesting to read as a person who doesn't experience music deeply.
dumberquestions 2 days ago [-]
I think not being able to experience music as much as I do would be akin to losing an entire sense.
colordrops 2 days ago [-]
For real, it's about the only thing that reliably causes ego dissolution and bliss for me. And I've spent decades with various meditation practices. Nothing beats music.
saghm 2 days ago [-]
I have no clue how common an experience this is, but I quite literally get goosebumps when listening to music sometimes if it inspires strong enough emotion for me. I mentioned this to my friend who I played in a band with once, and later when we were listening to something I really liked I held up my arm to show him, and he was shocked because I guess he thought I did not mean literally literally. The hair on my arms genuinely stands up at the end and produces goosebumps purely because of what I feel when listening to music that resonates strongly enough with me; some sections of some songs produce it fairly reliably if I haven't listened to it recently.
> The sensation can occur as a mildly to moderately pleasurable emotional response to music
If goosebumps are only "mildly to moderately pleasurable", I really need to know what kind of music the author listens to!
saghm 2 days ago [-]
TIL! Thanks for the reference
intrikate 2 days ago [-]
This happens to me all the time! I'll be in the car with my wife and a song I really like will come up, and the section hits and I'll say "Goosebumps!" and show her my arm. She also did not believe me until I physically showed her.
They are often songs that are attached to important emotional events in my life, sure, but there are also songs that come out of nowhere and still give me goosebumps. Some things are just that moving!
senderista 2 days ago [-]
Same for me; the frisson at particular passages of a song or piece is almost completely predictable. There might be a few dozen such passages for me; I haven't really thought about it.
1718627440 2 days ago [-]
There are also certain frequencies you can use to instill fear in people subconsciously.
wry_discontent 2 days ago [-]
It can feel like that sometimes.
It's weird cause there's this whole set of things (favorite bands/live shows/albums/etc) that most people are really into and care a lot about and it's a big absence in my life.
cachius 2 days ago [-]
Next time stop the car and only listen
munificent 2 days ago [-]
Maybe the engine and the wind is an important part of the sonic experience.
IndySun 1 days ago [-]
Can you drive and listen to music - are you actually doing both at the same time?
viccis 2 days ago [-]
If you found Schopenhauer's thoughts on it interesting, I'd recommend giving The Birth of Tragedy a read to see where a young Nietzsche took it, relating it to poetry.
2 days ago [-]
virgil_disgr4ce 2 days ago [-]
This reminds me of when I did ketamine therapy. For some reason, the ONLY tether to reality that stayed intact during the k-hole was the ambient drones/loops coming through the headphones. Even during the experience I found this insane. Why should that one particular sense be carried through when everything else was left so far behind as to feel incomprehensibly alien?
lo_zamoyski 2 days ago [-]
Music is not "pure abstraction" detached from concrete reality. Music has objective properties communicated via audible medium, and what's more, of a quantitative nature. It expresses order. The more beautiful music is, the more integrity, proportion, and clarity it has.
Indeed, we might say music moves our senses and through them shifts our passions; our intellects through expressed order and pattern which we abstract from it; and our wills by appealing to our desire for beauty. Accordingly, we can rank music based on where the effect is greatest. Does it appeal more to the carnal or to the higher faculties?
That neurons play a role is not at odds with the above. It is fallacious to lump the existence of neurons and their role in human apprehension of reality with some kind of intellectually poor metaphysical stance like materialism.
nuxi 2 days ago [-]
I was intrigued by your (philosophical) comment and I'm interested in what kind of music you usually listen to.
My thoughts:
> Music has objective properties communicated via audible medium, and what's more, of a quantitative nature.
I would argue that this is probably a western-classical view of music. Music can be quantified/measured, but those numbers are just a tiny part of the listening experience.
> It expresses order.
Sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean that "maximum order" is the most pleasing one. Expectation/resolution etc. may be important, but what if for example a tune does not resolve to expectations? Is it automatically "bad music"?
> The more beautiful music is, the more integrity, proportion, and clarity it has.
Beauty is in the eye (or maybe better in this case - the ear) of the beholder. And for me personally beauty isn't necessarily clarity. I like dissonance in music, maybe some atonality, quarter tones/microtonality, irregular rhythms and polyrhythms etc. These things somewhat violate the aesthetic value (beauty) and that is what makes it more interesting, at least to me.
Just my 2p, I'd be happy to hear your point of view :)
analog31 1 days ago [-]
>>> I would argue that this is probably a western-classical view of music. Music can be quantified/measured, but those numbers are just a tiny part of the listening experience.
Actually in practice, stuff that goes outside the "list of numbers" is a huge part of learning to play western music, including classical. It was emphasized by my teachers, going practically all the way back to my first lesson.
Even traditional art often tries to do more than compress concepts, it tries to express the inexpressible.
Linguistic determinism/relativity (Sapir-Worf, etc) explains some of it. People can FEEL that their thoughts are being constrained by language, but they don't know how to express that and maybe don't even consciously realize that it's their real problem. They just figure out that art makes it feel a little better so they do art.
Here are some example 21st century painters: https://medium.com/@John_Dalton/living-masters-the-top-13-re...
Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.
Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".
And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.
What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.
With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.
I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.
But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).
While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.
My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.
Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.
With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.
Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.
But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.
So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.
So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.
A fast BPM song alone would be indicative of events where things are happening fast and quickly.
When I see a picture on a computer screen, it evokes similar emotions as seeing the real thing, since the light that ends up on my retina is very similar, even so other aspects of the sensory input might be missing.
Music on the other side doesn't really have a natural analog. Nature is mostly just wind and water noises, with a bit of bird song and chirping crickets. The only thing they have in common with music is that they are all sounds, but the structure and complexity is quite different.
Music as an offshoot from pre-language communication seems more likely, it could explain the emotional component at least, since groups of animals might need to sync their emotional state. But even there you end up with quite a big leap between what sounds happen naturally and what we call music.
Having participated in a lot of free improv music (one of my cohort has a grammy related to it), I am not sure if there really are a lot of patterns going on there. I am not a fan and it doesn't feel fun for me in the way that sitting with a band and playing Django-style music ("Tears" or "Swing 42" or "September Song").
I don't think it's a noise thing, I think there just isn't much "signal" getting compressed so the decoders are doing way more than they should.
I suspect, though, that many of those patterns are inaccessible by an audience, or even the other musicians. Or sometimes to the person performing said patterns.
If you could hear music on the surface of Mars without a space suit, I’m pretty sure it would sound quite different.
Of course, the sound that non-electrical instruments make is indeed dependent on the atmosphere in which they are played, assuming the same motions etc. You could probably make a violin produce the exact same sounds that it does on Earth playing it on Mars, but you'd have to play it differently than you do here. But even this doesn't apply to electrical instruments - Jimi Hendrix would sound the same if he could somehow play on the surface of Mars.
In that sense, I think any form of atmosphere, it will have its own music but it would probably not sound great in other atmospheres.
Also, any atmosphere can carry any sound wave for at least some distance. It takes more or less energy to do so, and if the medium attenuates rapidly, you have to start with higher frequencies so that the right frequency reaches your audience, but that's it. You need different instruments to play in different atmospheres, sure, but not different music. And electrical instruments actually work exactly the same regardless of the medium.
It is also possible that people are listening to the music for reasons other than the music itself (community, feelings of superiority, etc.)
Either way, it sure does explain the popularity. If you consider it as predictability instead of compression, it might make more sense. Listeners have an expectation on what music sounds like and popular music is going to ride that line between the listeners expectations and something more original and stray from those expectations.
I think this could also be why AI music is so bad, because it can hit the listener's expectations, but the ways that it strays from them are seemingly random, which is why a big reason to why it is so uncanny.
As an example, EDM music is highly predictable, and highly popular.
African tribal drum music is also highly predictable, while also being complex in poly-rhythmic ways.
Yet it's way more fun if the music evolves and takes twists you don't expected. I actually get quite aggressive from to predictable music, basically most modern pop music, but I guess that's highly subjective. For me good music must be intellectual exhaustive.
(Collins dictionary, noun 'theory')
The minor third communicates sadness in speech, mirroring its use in music
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20515223/
This reminded me of how I keep hearing that major doesn't really sound happy, and minor doesn't really sound sad, it's purely cultural. (But Bouba does really sound round... :)
That doesn't sound right to me, but in that case maybe the speech thing is cultural too? It would be interesting to test it in other cultures. (Preferably ones that haven't been exposed to western music, if there still is such a thing!)
> Major chords (which is what people who grew up hearing Western music tend to rate as positive), the Kalash instead describe as “strange,” rating them as less pleasant to listen to than “the most dissonant [of] all the possible tetrachords possible within the octave”.
The quote is not calling a major chords a tetrachord; it's comparing major chords to the set of tetrachords (whatever the quoted person has in mind; the linked paper isn't immediately accessible to me), despite not being a member.
For the harmonic convention of chords based on stacked fourths, I've always heard it called "quartal" harmony, but my knowledge doesn't go very deep there.
In any case, wikipedia disagrees.
> In music theory, a tetrachord (Greek: τετράχορδoν; Latin: tetrachordum) is a series of four notes separated by three intervals
They meant (like Wikipedia says) that traditionally a tetrachord spans a perfect fourth (i.e., that's the interval between the first and last notes), not that it's a stack of perfect fourths.
As to the original point, any discussion about dissonance of chords is meaningless without mention of temperament: in the modern tuning system (equal temperament[1]) both major and minor triads are pretty dissonant, look at the thirds at the table in the section named "Comparison with just intonation" in that Wikipedia page.
We have been dealing with the tension between keeping thirds and fifths pleasant for centuries: very roughly, people used meantone temperaments[2] in the Renaissance (which had perfectly tuned thirds), then came the era of well temperament[3], and eventually we settled for the simpler equal temperament we use today with its nasty thirds (it has several other advantages, but "having pleasant major and minor triads" is not one of them).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meantone_temperament
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament
It's explained in the article, but I want to emphasize that "well temperament" was not a single thing, but various separate attempts at compromise. Bach wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier seemingly to celebrate the idea of tunings that sound acceptable in every key (without the wolf fifths of meantone temperaments), but it's not at all clear what specific tuning he had in mind, if any:
> During much of the 20th century it was presumed, possibly mistakenly, that Bach intended equal temperament, which after Bach's death became popular as the standard keyboard tuning, and had been described by theorists and musicians for at least a century before Bach's birth. Accounts of Bach's own tuning practice are few and inexact. …Despite the presumption of equal temperament, research has continued into various unequal systems contemporary with Bach's career; there is debate whether Bach might have meant a range of similar temperaments, perhaps altered slightly in practice from piece to piece, or possibly some single, specific, "well-tempered" solution for all purposes…
Personally, while I know on some academic level that our 12edo minor and major thirds are off by something like 14 cents, they don't sound unpleasant to me. I think it takes a specific sort of ear training to become really, er, attuned to purely consonant intervals and to notice dissonance on that level (which only produces real clashes in the higher harmonics).
My reference for audio quality.
https://live1.sr.se/p2-flac
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/03/15/writers-on-music/
The academy doesn’t give a sh*t. Nothing but rejections across the board.
How did it reach a point where doctors of philosophy don’t want anything to do with deeper mysteries?
Cann't say something more, but it just made me a bit sad, and feel some nostalgia, and find how times flies over the years
Share the link below:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=sD115Li2Jl8&si=reD6a3Cjvt3...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injection_locking
So we just kinda pretend that it exactly equals 19.
Bridge of Waves: What music is and how listening to it changes the world, by W.A. Mathieu, is a sound book about how music is possible.
For me there's something magical in the reed flute (ney) that's almost trancelike, same with many traditional Persian instruments:
songs with reed flute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVCciFbfhM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cifAO6bPOY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zRZ183KcO8
other traditional Persian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv_JhKJRr2Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWYXSndbMFg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddxrUt1Szv4
I grew up listening to music like this so I wonder what effect it has on others
and here is a musical rendition of a poem by Rumi about the reed flute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbSCUOTLZBo
Lyric translation/transliteration: https://www.icloud.com/notes/0d7PZiAnuCJFlDdhPvv2NnLcg
"Rumi, the great poet of Persia, often speaks about the ney and his great work Masnavi opens with the words “listen to the ney”. He says the pains and sorrows the soul experiences through life are like holes made in a reed flute, and it is by making these holes that a player makes the flute out of a reed. This means that the heart of man is first a reed and the sufferings and pains it goes through make it a flute which can then be used by God as the instrument for the music that He constantly wishes to produce. It was on the model of the heart of man that the first musical instrument was made, and no earthly instrument can produce that music which the heart produces, raising the mortal soul to immortality."
https://library.acropolis.org/the-reed-flute-in-sufism/
That's part of the premise of the movie "The History of Future Folk".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2245195/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2oKGSmr9oo
If goosebumps are only "mildly to moderately pleasurable", I really need to know what kind of music the author listens to!
They are often songs that are attached to important emotional events in my life, sure, but there are also songs that come out of nowhere and still give me goosebumps. Some things are just that moving!
It's weird cause there's this whole set of things (favorite bands/live shows/albums/etc) that most people are really into and care a lot about and it's a big absence in my life.
Indeed, we might say music moves our senses and through them shifts our passions; our intellects through expressed order and pattern which we abstract from it; and our wills by appealing to our desire for beauty. Accordingly, we can rank music based on where the effect is greatest. Does it appeal more to the carnal or to the higher faculties?
That neurons play a role is not at odds with the above. It is fallacious to lump the existence of neurons and their role in human apprehension of reality with some kind of intellectually poor metaphysical stance like materialism.
My thoughts:
> Music has objective properties communicated via audible medium, and what's more, of a quantitative nature.
I would argue that this is probably a western-classical view of music. Music can be quantified/measured, but those numbers are just a tiny part of the listening experience.
> It expresses order.
Sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean that "maximum order" is the most pleasing one. Expectation/resolution etc. may be important, but what if for example a tune does not resolve to expectations? Is it automatically "bad music"?
> The more beautiful music is, the more integrity, proportion, and clarity it has.
Beauty is in the eye (or maybe better in this case - the ear) of the beholder. And for me personally beauty isn't necessarily clarity. I like dissonance in music, maybe some atonality, quarter tones/microtonality, irregular rhythms and polyrhythms etc. These things somewhat violate the aesthetic value (beauty) and that is what makes it more interesting, at least to me.
Just my 2p, I'd be happy to hear your point of view :)
Actually in practice, stuff that goes outside the "list of numbers" is a huge part of learning to play western music, including classical. It was emphasized by my teachers, going practically all the way back to my first lesson.