How is music possible
henrikkarlsson.xyz125 points by rafaelc 15 hours ago
125 points by rafaelc 15 hours 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.
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.
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.
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.
That doesn't really explain the popularity at times of clicks-and-beeps music and some other modern music.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm. I wonder if that can say anything about an individual's brain. That is, what type if people like the rhythmicity?
> 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.
And then there is whatever copulation the Jazz players are doing with their saxophones.
You mean you have a hypothesis. :) A theory is an entire body of facts and experiments.
"3. a speculative or conjectural view or idea"
(Collins dictionary, noun 'theory')
Surely only in the specific meaning of "scientific theory"? E.g theory of gravity.
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?
He touched on the difference in how we perceive minor chords but the 'texture' of sound can have a big impact as well.
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."
The article mentioned this study:
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!)
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”.
"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.
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
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament
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?
Relatedly, some nice things in here:
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.
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
Share the link below:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=sD115Li2Jl8&si=reD6a3Cjvt3...
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.
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.
It's probably something around the idea of an external oscillator influencing the one in our heads.
I'm convinced that music and spoken language are closely related.
Good article.
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.
Music is possible because 12 log2 3 is almost equal to 19.
So we just kinda pretend that it exactly equals 19.
I think music when enjoyed triggers the brain to go into a different thinking mode.
I like to wonder if there are alien civilizations out there with no music or art.
There are such civilizations here on earth: ants. Termites. Honey bees.
If you squint hard enough, you might see the music/art directly in the structure of their civilizations
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.
Maybe it's not an obvious direct connection, but in general good artists seem to get more action than the average person.
Once you understand the role of happy in positive reproductive outcomes (long term, not pre- or immediately post-natal, their role is fairly obvious.
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.
This was really interesting to read as a person who doesn't experience music deeply.
I think not being able to experience music as much as I do would be akin to losing an entire sense.
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.
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.
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!
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.
There are also certain frequencies you can use to instill fear in people subconsciously.
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.
Next time stop the car and only listen
Maybe the engine and the wind is an important part of the sonic experience.
Can you drive and listen to music - are you actually doing both at the same time?
Trying to explain why music is magical risks killing it with words. A lot of things are best left unspoken.
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...
Respectfully, I find your sentiment baffling. For me, knowing more about something enhances its value.
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"
Knowing why I want to headbang isn't going to stop me from headbanging in the moment
Some people find beauty in the explanations and understanding too, Feynman being a very famous example of this.
Explain how anything could in any way "kill music."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :)
>>> 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.
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