We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition.
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.
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).
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.
Songs are repeated melodies following standard structure.
Plenty of music isn't. But maybe the joy there is that it's not as formulaic?
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".
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
Exactly. Good music never ever goes where you expect and should always suspend the listener in a delightful unease.
I'm a non-musician that love jazz, fusion, prog, etc. What I need from music is human rhythm. I am revolted by Bach style mathematical fugues and so forth, they're different... not music in the way my mind and heart thinks of music.
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.
I think it's also about the surprise of something violating the pattern. That's why jokes are entertaining too. When crafting a joke, you need to build some expectations and then break them all of a sudden. Music has patterns and moments that break those patterns to an extent, so why wouldn't the same thing apply here?
Music also has this borderline magical property of manipulating human emotions. People listen to sad music to feel sad or angry music to feel angry and so on. I think that sort of thing is another reason why music is so popular.
Just like in any form of media, we enjoy a balance between familiarity and novelty. Different people have a different sweet spot for that balance, which is where we get different genres and styles
Explain why Jazz is so fucking awesome then.
Jazz is my favorite genre to play- this thinking sill applies but it's a lot more abstract- even if there is heavy improv as is the style, it's still musical patterns over repeating chord changes. Couple that with the subversion of expectation thing I mentioned elsewhere in this thread and it's a winning formula if I've ever heard one.
That's why I like comedy and soulslikes. The subversion of expectations 😃
Jazz has patterns and repetition, like any interesting music genre. If it didn't, it'd be called noise. They just aren't as in your face and predictable as the ones employed by pop genres.
Smoke - Everything 1973 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQoGSIO2H94 (entry point 20m50s)
Kollectiv Live 1973 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFduBZSUO7s
Vladimir Ussachevsky Electronic 1950 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_cjxT5baQY
Missus Beastly - Dr Aftershave & The Mixed Pickles 1976 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86jwsj_egms
Pink Floyd Atom Heart Mother 1970 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ErOK3kgbDc
Ramsey Lewis Trio Live 1983 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8QZUi3Htrg
Herbie Hancock Cantaloupe Island Live 1991 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZOkyQx3jIw
Flying Luttenbachers - Fist Through Glass 1995 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4e20WDe7lA
William Onyeabor - Let's Fall in Love 1983 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjoCIiGXIhE
Manu Dibango - Zoom 2000 1972 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHCXszR1ebw&t=1158s
Keith Jarrett Solo Concerts Bremen/Lausanne 1973 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp68gVWLymA
Agitation Free Live 1973 - https://youtu.be/-VzUVszWQdk?t=76
Tommy Guerrero - Road to Knowhere 2018 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0LZ20ppkNo
More wild speculation:
And then you listen to Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (275 time signature changes)
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 this is getting it backwards. Here I’ll go (warning, evopsych style speculation follows):
Our brains are great pattern recognizers because it makes us better at learning music (and other structured forms such as poetry). Music is older than all the civilizations on earth. We learn music because it’s an incredibly powerful aid to memorization. Memorization and oral recitation is the oldest form of cultural transmission we have.
Culture is the secret of our success as a species. It’s the original problem solver that gave us so many tools and techniques to survive on every continent on the planet (except Antarctica of course). Culture is the reason we learned to prepare so many foods which would have been poisonous otherwise (such as cassava).
Imo it's very unlikely that we grew to like music that already existed rather than growing to like audio patterns and then noticing we can make music.
Almost nothing in evolution happened sequentially. We almost certainly didn’t start creating music before our brains were equipped for it. Instead these things would’ve evolved in tandem. Each one driving the other, in a virtuous cycle.
This is a cool take! I don't think I agree though. I assume we developed pattern recognition before music/language. Many animals have the ability to note attributes about plants and animals even without the ability to communicate complex ideas (ie language or oral tradition). I assume that type of pattern recognition was a good blueprint for functions like music and language, but my guess is it started from a general pattern recognition, then was retuned for music and language.
Again, pure speculation, but there is some logic behind it!
For a long time lots of European music was mostly thorough-composed, where there was little to no repitition. Madrigals (the popular music of the renaissance) were mostly like this, the melody would follow it's own journey with no chorus / verse or other repetitive structure. I might be remembering wrong, but I think it was early baroque and Monteverdi's Orfeo that popularised repeating structures, and turns out people love them. If you back and listen to some madrigals, it's a very different approach to music. (also, there was folks music and all sorts of other traditions, which used more repeating patterns, that seem more familiar to us.)
Ya let’s not pretend why humans enjoy music. No one can explain it.
We like music because it acts like a pleasurable drug. Probably something primitive and hormonal that is connected to mating (like birds do with bird song).
Music showers my brain!
I think it is way more deep than that.
Frankly, this kind of reductive deconstruction of human experience is a huge part of what's going wrong with society. Music is created by people who dedicate themselves to exploring the world we experience, and discovering nuance which evokes feelings that can not be simply explained, betraying the existence of deeper layers of human experience than anything directly available to cold analysis.
Certainly there are then those who copy the form of works created by such artists, who actually do treat music that way, but the result is like the output of a LLM, and repetition of such a style is like training AI on it's own data, progressively degrading what was once there.
Art is sublimated sex drive
Music (and other art forms) happen to trigger our brains to shoot the same happy/sad/etc chemicals other less abstract physical experiences do, for reasons we don't completely understand. I'm utterly confused why being aware of them, or having the curiosity of wanting to learn more about it, is "what's going wrong with society". If anything, curiosity is one of the main things that kickstarted us as a species, and brushing it off to some abstract "deeper layers of human existence" like it was some sorcery we shouldn't dare try to understand would be way more concerning about our state as a society. As for the completeness of this particular theory... I mean, we are on /c/showerthoughts after all.
It's absolutely worth an entire lifetime of exploration. But dismissing things you can't explain away immediately with chemical processes, as some sort of unknowable sorcery, is exactly why I call it reductive. As far as I'm concerned, maintaining a reverence for the fact that you will never be capable of conclusively explaining such things, because there is vastly more detail involved than even a thousand lifetimes could ever uncover, is necessary if you want to actually begin to learn about what's really happening.
Lighten up, Francis.
