Music is just layered simple patterns and our brains LOVE IT.
Sound is pressure waves, musical notes are a specific pattern of pressure waves. Melodies are repeated musical notes. Songs are repeated melodies following standard structure.
Our brains love trying to decode and parse all these overlapping patterns.
Maybe not really a shower thought and more wild speculation.
We like music for the same reason we like games, stories and successfully accomplishing tasks.
It’s the vibe that it evokes.
Patterns evoke a vibe too.
Vibe = poetry emotion energy.
It’s a sensation like sight, sound, smell etc. Just a different kind.
Interestingly there is a body of research that suggests enjoyment of music comes from having exactly one of two things, never both:
Familiarity and predictability
If it’s neither familiar nor predictable, it is inscrutable and therefore discomforting to listen to
If it is both familiar and predictable it is boring
If it’s familiar but unpredictable, it feels like a journey through known emotions
If it’s predictable but unfamiliar it feels like ‘logical discovery’ and is fun and satisfying
A bit reductive but I love this idea
I’ve heard that before, but isn’t this easily defended by the fact that people who listen to the same song over and over again exist?
I can listen to Ado music over and over, it gets better every time. So then there is familiarity and predictability (since I know that piece of music rather well by then).
Listening to the same song over and over is no longer for enjoyment, it is for the feelings of safety that your body is comfortable in.
No, that is definitely for enjoyment
Prog music lovers in shambles.
Polyrhythms and polymeters are still patterns. They’re often harder to perceive and follow than your typical 4/4, but we’re still searching for the beat and bobbing our heads to the complex patterns it creates.
I strongly believe that our brains are fundamentally just prediction machines. We strive for a specific level of controlled novelty, but for the most part ‘understanding’ (i.e. being able to predict) the world around us is the goal. We get boredom to push us beyond getting too comfortable and simply sitting in the already familiar, and one of the biggest pleasures in life is the ‘aha’ moment when understanding finally clicks in place and we feel we can predict something novel.
I feel this is also why LLMs (ChatGPT etc.) can be so effective working with language, and why they occasionally seem to behave so humanlike – The fundamental mechanism is essentially the same as our brains, if massively more limited. Animal brains continuously adapt to predict sensory input (and to an extent their own output), while LLMs learn to predict a sequence of text tokens during a restricted training period.
It also seems to me the strongest example of this kind of prediction in animals is the noticing (and wariness) when something feels ‘off’ about the environment around us. We can easily sense specific kinds of small changes to our surroundings that signify potential danger, even in seemingly unpredictable natural environments. From an evolutionary perspective this also seems like the most immediately beneficial aspect of this kind of predictive capability. Interstingly, this kind of prediction seems to happen even on the level of individual neurons. As predictive capability improves, it also necessitates an increasingly deep ability to model the world around us, leading to deeper cognition.
I agree, LLMs have the amazingly human ability to bumble into the right answer even if they don’t know why.
It seems to me that a good analogy of our experience is a whole bunch of LLMs optimized for different tasks that have some other LLM scheduler/administrator for the lower level models that is consciousness. Might be more layers deep, but that’s my guess with no neurological or machine learning background.
I think it is way more deep than that.
Songs are repeated melodies following standard structure.
Plenty of music isn’t. But maybe the joy there is that it’s not as formulaic?
A joke is just lighting up an unexpected or long unused connection in the brain. 🤷♂️
Even when it doesn’t repeat itself, after repeated listens I find satisfaction just in knowing the weird places that the music goes. A lot of my favorite songs took a few listens to “click”.
As a speculation it’s really pretty good. Many years ago there was a Scientific American article about why people like music. It was long and complicated but the tl;dr would go something like:
Well-liked music of any genre tends to contain fractal patterns. Doesn’t matter if it’s jazz, classical, rock or whatever. If you probe our peripheral nervous system you get a lot of white noise, but the closer you get to the central nervous system the more fractal the signal becomes, as if our nervous system is filtering out the noise and letting the fractal part of our perceptions get through to our brains. This makes it very likely that our thoughts and memories are fractal patterns, which means that on a purely mathematical level there could be similarities between patterns that encode ideas that aren’t related by context - for example, when a piece of music makes you think of the ocean, or flying birds, or the big city, it’s probably because the music’s pattern and the idea’s pattern in your head are mathematically similar.
Musician here. This is definitely true, BUT interest can also come from subversion of those expectations. Can be seen in prog music and math rock (subversion of musical forms), funk (subversion of rhythmic expectation with lots of upbeats and short notes), etc
