Fascinating Article About Music

[mbhaub]

I ran across this today:

http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/why-we-love-repetition-in-music/

It's quite interesting and goes a long ways to explaining why we understand and like the music we do - repetition is the key. There is an extremely weird sound experiment that is very illuminating. For me, the experiment worked perfectly and the effect was clearly audible. My tone-deaf wife, who doesn't appreciate music too much heard nothing. Try it out.

[Amphissa]

Interesting. I was not at all familiar with this line of research. Thanks for posting it.

I'm not sure what to think of one passage. She says, "music is not a natural object." I suppose this hinges on the definition of "object," but my question concerns her use of the word "natural." The way in which the statement is made gives the impression that she might believe that music is an artificial object, or an unnatural object. Or is she saying that it is not an object, but something else? What would that be?

Yet her examples throughout, such as ritualistic speech patterns, to me mark evidence that music is inherent in us, that it is completely natural. Otherwise, it would not affect such an overwhelming percentage of the human race, no matter where they live or what their culture. Music does not exist outside the perception of the listener. It is innately natural.

Did I misinterpret her meaning?

And she seems to think that any sounds, if they are repeated, become musical. I must think about that. Perhaps it depends on one's definition of music. The fact that you can recognize and even mimic (mentally or vocally) repeated sounds may not mean that the sounds are musical. But maybe they are. Maybe the mind takes random sounds and imposes musicality upon the sequence in order to remember the sounds -- as a sort of contextualization. Maybe that is an ancestral trait similar to the way we count and remember sequences of objects by mathematical means.

Way back in the day, when I took my degree in philosophy, I had but a smattering of aesthetics in my studies. Maybe in my dotterhood I should return to reading aesthetics.

Or maybe I should simply permit our resident music scholars to help me through these tangled paths.

Of course, repetition can march into the realm of monotony, or downright obnoxiousness. No amount of repetition and imprinting will turn most rap into music for me, nor does repeated dissonant sound become musical, just because it is repeated.

Not to me. If I don't like the repeated sounds, I turn them off. And I forget them -- although I sometimes remember the nausea I experienced hearing them. 

[Mark Thomas]

Fascinating, very plausible and, as Martin says, the audio experiment is very telling.

[semloh]

Amphissa, you said "If I don't like the repeated sounds, I turn them off. And I forget them -- although I sometimes remember the nausea I experienced hearing them."    This is my reaction precisely - and I don't think we need to mention the "serial offenders" by name!

For me, it's not so much the discernment of repetition as structure that helps me appreciate music. I rarely appreciate a piece of music in which I can not discern a structure.

I have only a smattering of knowledge of aesthetics, but your comments about what is 'natural' remind me of the Platonic approach to aesthetics, drawing on the theory of ideal forms, to the effect that the statue of the Venus de Milo, say, was inherent in its creator, fully formed and perfect; she/he merely had to represent the ideal as best they could in a material form. From this perspective, all art is imperfect and entirely natural - I think! 

[jdperdrix]

The experiment did not work for me. Is it because English is not my mother tongue? In any case, music and language are not processed by the same part of the brain. There's also a difference between mother tongue and foreign language... I think it's much more complicated than this simple experiment tries to suggest.