The idea is that the brain finds it pleasing to learn things. It effectively seeks novelty. Repetitive, predictable music does not sound pleasing. Pure randomness also does not sound pleasing. Somewhere in between is novelty. Patterns that are definitely real, but new. That somehow violate your brains expectations.
I think these musical patterns discovered by the brain are multi-dimensional. The music is just a serialization of this multi-dimensional object, possessing various kinds of symmetries at different levels. It's as if a complex model was presented piece by piece, allowing the receiver to reassemble it. When the multi-dimensional structure was recovered, there is a feeling of "musical" pleasure. Every note is integrated with the other notes, has it's place in this structure its significance to us emerges by its relation to the whole structure.
The ability to enjoy music is related to how good the high-dimensional reconstruction is. A listener who has no experience with a genre might not perceive subtle symmetries and higher order patterns, thus, it's just some kind of noise. The more she listens, the more her musical "vocabulary" and ability to perceive these symmetries increase. Developing taste for it is developing ability to represent it fully as it is, a form of integrated information.
"The more she listens" part is likely why we can listen to an album once and dislike it and then on a second, third and fourth listen develop an increasing appreciation for it until it potentially becomes a favorite album. I always found that phenomenon strange, but your comment is an interesting theory for why that happens.
Anecdotal but I feels as if that goes against standard chord progression, keys, and almost all EDM.
Blues has a fairly strict formula in which most songs follow. Most songs are in 4/4, and most modern music sounds fairly similar yet people are really into it.
Aren't those patterns and structures just there to avoid the cognitive overload, while we're entertained by lesser variations?
(BTW, I believe we're overly simplifying by speaking of music as a single entity. All of the elements you mentioned are a foundation in more popular music, but good luck finding them in more modern or experimental genres.)
The cognitive effort to digest Schoenberg is different from that for a pop song. Still, you can progressively familiarize yourself with a genre, and relax on pieces that seemed hard and inaccessible earlier.
> Still, you can progressively familiarize yourself with a genre, and relax on pieces that seemed hard and inaccessible earlier.
Yes, as a passionate music collector and someone that can get lost in weird, obscure and very leftfield music, this is something I notice all the time. You start with something accessible only to find yourself enjoying obscure 70s synth funk recorded on tape in someone's bedroom months/years later. Or similar.
It's why we recommend "Kind of blue" whenever someone wants to get into Jazz, which is difficult if you just randomly start...anywhere.
it's almost mystifying to me at this point that not everyone's on board with this idea. most of what i care about musically is captured poorly by the traditional notation of western classical music.
Many electronic music producers (including myself) share a similar sentiment. There's a lot to a carefully produced song that can't be fully encompassed by sheet music.
Most 12-bar blues use a similar chord progression but have different melodies. Even the same song performed by two different musicians will sound different enough to be perceived as "novel".
Even lovers of serious music have certain favorite recordings that they listen to repeatedly, even though those pieces have been recorded by dozens of others.
Pop music is repetitive and predictable, yet, ... well, enough said there.
There's the abstraction of music, and then there's music.
Just because we can transcribe an audio recording into 12 tones, and 16 divisions of a bar, doesn't mean that's all the information it contains. There's a whole lot more.
There's little variations in pitch, tone, dynamics, etc. All the stuff that separates a great recording from a lifeless snooze.
My theory is that pleasing music falls half way been the predictable, and the unpredictable. So if the beat is too predictable, the artist can always compensate by using an unusual melody... etc. But many of the ways an artist can add unpredictability can't be expressed with traditional notation.
The difference is the space of time between experiences.
I'm a "lover of serious music" and I do have some favorite albums that I come back to every now and then. But I don't listen to the same song in a constant loop on repeat. That would be dreadfully boring.
Similarly, most people would not enjoy a song consisting solely of a single measure repeated verbatim over and over again. Even the most repetitive music has some variation.
Not a single measure, but this one must be at the limit of how repetitive music can be while still being interesting (at least for a few minutes, for me): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RY26KNRhbOA
Which makes me think - maybe algorithmic composition would work better the other way around - start with one or two short phrases and repeat them, adding more variation, and different types of variation over longer timescales.
Reminds me of The Antikythera Mechanism by BT (This Binary Universe) [0]. Each "loop" sample isn't because it's subtly different from the previous one, and when a phrase loops back again, the context changed, creating progression all along the song.
I seem to recall I read somewhere that (part of?) the album was painstakingly made using Supercollider [1], but can't find a proper reference.
The decaying of the audio is beautiful. I hadn't heard of this project before, and now I have 5 hours of ambient music to code to today, thanks so much for sharing!
Depends on the personality and relationship with music. In the past I had gone through periods of listening to the same two or three tracks over and over again, day in and day out while driving to and from work.
I play music, which requires listening to yourself practice the same things over and over again. Sometimes just a couple of bars. I like it.
Even if you get bored, that is not the same thing as the music suddenly sounding "bad". It sounds exactly the same.
I also play music and understand what you mean by practicing the same things over and over again.
But when you are practicing, you rarely play it exactly the same each time. Otherwise, what's the point of practicing? Hopefully, it sounds a bit better every time you go through it.
actually, here's some recent research suggesting that the experience is less universal than is often assumed (or at least, much more dependent on culture, and less so on basic universal human biology, which is what i assume people are talking about when they say universal here):
The idea is that the brain finds it pleasing to learn things. It effectively seeks novelty. Repetitive, predictable music does not sound pleasing. Pure randomness also does not sound pleasing. Somewhere in between is novelty. Patterns that are definitely real, but new. That somehow violate your brains expectations.