Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XuAaf | Excerpts:
According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’—a pleasant-sounding combination of notes—is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these ‘integer ratios’ are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music ‘dissonant,’ unpleasant sounding.
But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.
First: “We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.”
Second:
“Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of their shape and physics, are what we would call ‘inharmonic.’”
“Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don’t need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy.”
I think perfect music starts to approach the uncanny valley just like a perfect human face does. Where it’s just missing some piece that you can’t quite figure out. Also distortion/saturation makes music sound better, pretty much always.
Sooo… more Jimi Hendrix, less Sousa Marching Band, eh? What about stuff like Kraftwerk? Their stuff is intentionally ‘robotic’ so I’m wondering if you find it either boring or disagreeable – or if instead it becomes pleasing for achieving its goal. I am in the last camp for that, but I have to be in the mood.
Regardless, I think most musicians intuitively know audiences prefer variation (or just have that preference themselves). I mean, for decades now drum machines/software has had a “human drummer” option to make beats come in slightly off-beat (but don’t tell that to the characters in “Whiplash”).
Those aren’t perfect though, there’s still distortion and unsteadyness. As an audio engineer, even when an instrument is super clean, I add a little saturation to make it come to life. And yes much electronic music is perfect rhythm wise, but they often mess with more complexity to make it feel off or lean into the uncanny nature of it’s perfection.
Just because it’s in the uncanny valley doesn’t make it bad.
This applies to all music. Sousa is Sousa, but Ragtime was once as radical as Hendrix.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eHGiXSLkrNg
Stravinsky’s first performance of The Rites of Spring was so disruptive it inspired exaggerations that riots broke out immediately.
One of the things that I think is probably about Kraftwerk and other electronic music is that often their synths are very slightly detuned so that intervals aren’t perfect and sounds that aren’t perfectly consonant. This gives it a “crunchier”, more complex sound that is more pleasing than sounds that are perfectly in tune/in phase with each other.
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“We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.”
Math, Music & Movement: The Missy Elliot SupaDupa Law™
Humans think they’re pretty cool. If there is a language of the universe, it’s Mathematics and we’re pretty good at math. A very smart Jesuit I knew once said this ability to do complex math might be evidence for God, since there’s no evolutionary reason for humans to be able to do geometry, differential equations, physics, etc. Or is there?
I can’t dance well either, I’m no good at sports + billiards ain’t my thing. But I’m not falling down all the time, am I? I can still play such games good enough. And I can still catch a suddenly falling object, my brain calculating in micro seconds which arm to use, which body shift, where to grab and when to close my hand, even compensating for the object’s structure to avoid say, a sharp point. That’s all math, faster than any written equation that explains a neutron star.
Walking, typing, dancing, hitting a ball: are all possible because the body-mind connection is doing complex, unwritten calculations all the time + at the speed of electricity .
Without the idea of detailed external knowledge systems, like books and libraries, the smartest humans noticed and developed understanding of the movement patterns of the Moon, Sun, Stars and then building things like Stonehenge, etc. An African looooong ago started noticing a star at a different place each night, using some distinct mountain range’s silhouette to do so. They didn’t develop a concept of a calendar due to the demands of fixed agriculture, but developed a mental library of data processing that coordinated the memory of such celestial realities and applied them, first unconsciously and then consciously, to other patterns their minds also noted and stored, such as the cycles of plants, weather, animal migration, etc. All without paper, all without a college degree.
I think these capabilities aren’t a connection to God, but proof we can all “speak” the language of the universe without being taught it directly. As an infant on up, we are developing our coordination, wild math, or we’d never survive as a species.
Music, of course, is patterns, but wilder. The young and dangerous folks called Jazz musicians are constantly developing new patterns, patterns which are often challenging at first listen -and annoying to the old. Those who are set in their ways, their minds dead from following dead patterns don’t get it. They’re trapped in jobs they hate, avoiding new music they hate, while commuting to work with a lazily formatted, narrowly selected set of already dead patterns (with names like Classic Rock), hating their kid’s music and sticking with a reduced representation of music they loved as a teenager, music which their parents hated.
We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.
And that preference is invigorating! Missy Elliot is one of the most creative pop stars of the last few decades. As she got older she got more seemingly dissonant and uneven. Her later music stops and jerks at odd moments, the patterns are anything but familiar - at first. But there’s method to both the music + unique video edits+ dancing, methods that make parents + conservatives mad. And this music -and the videos that sell it- are challenging, glorious and alive:
https://youtu.be/hHcyJPTTn9w?si=Min1xqnlwMECd-NX
My brain is much more flexible^1 than many my age, because, I calculate, as we age most are stuck in old loops, such ss commuting to work with the same narrow range of music they loved as a teen, courtesy of Morning Zoo DJ’s doing the same basic thing 5 days a week.
More flexible perception is fed by exercise and hobbies -and keeping up with new music, seeking out the freshest beats that often are the most criticized by those brain’s slowly dying in traffic each weekday morning.
There’s nothing wrong with a good pop song -slmost everybody loves Katy Perry- but jazz and hip hop are such are constantly challenging listeners with new pattern disturbances and musical challenges that are grounded in that math our mind makes, only it’s new formulas that exist in sound and movement only, no paper required, though a great producer and soundboard sure helps.
“Free your mind and your ass will follow” sang George Clinton. But maybe it’s the other way around.
Get your freak on, you’re all math geniuses and you don’t even know it.
https://youtu.be/FPoKiGQzbSQ?si=RQJOLRjASR5Kt2mj
I see patterns many my age do not, in part because certain observations rightly imply failure + guilt. Such as *Iraq is my Generations’ Vietnam, only worse and with no excuses. That’s painful, but there are no excuses this time.
“Free your mind and your ass will follow”
Go back. That was En Vogue’s shout-out to this mind blowing album.
Thanks for the reminder. Alas, there’s only two lines in that glorious piece, which I heard in grade school. But I was full of hormones when En Vogue came out, and we all know how much those drive everything, including memory.
Maggot Brain is George Clinton listening to a Grateful Dead album & then doing this: https://youtu.be/9jlQiHHMlkA?si=Q2eM7EOzr7z8JEUC
Skip to 2 minutes 30 seconds
Skip any bit of Maggot Brain?!? Sacrilege!
What a load of bs. Seeing patterns in just about everything is a human condition not proving any causality whatsoever…
You might want to think about your broken logic here a bit.
Oh OK, so you’re trolling, right? I thought that kind of behavior was not welcome on beehaw?
The guy is literally named after Bill Hicks and you think he’s trolling when he implies that human pattern recognition might be something profound?
Like, come on.
We’re not obligated to be hard-line skeptics as a species. The vast majority of us are not.
I’ve never heard of Bill Hicks… So are they trolling or not? Still cannot say. Seeing it as trolling seemed a more favorable interpretation of their tangled word salad.
While they may have said it in a confrontational way, flora is right. Humans are prone to pattern recognition, but we are often bad at getting it right. Evolutionary we don’t need it to be precise. There is little functional difference between 10 predators in the bushes and 15 predators in the bushes. The problem is that we very often see patterns where there are none. Pareidolia, Type I & II errors, and the Gambler’s Fallacy are all great, very common, examples of that.
