Comment by joeyspn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joeyspn | Hacker News Reader

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It has been proved that the subconscious finds more pleasurable musical simplicity or pieces that despite having many notes can be reduced to simple patterns:

There is a long held theory that the subconscious mind can recognise patterns within complex data and that we are hardwired to find simple patterns pleasurable. Dr Nicholas Hudson used 'lossless' music compression programs to mimic the brain's ability to condense audio information. He compared the amount of compressibility of random noise to a wide range of music including classical, techno, rock, and pop, and found that, while random noise could only be compressed to 86% of its original file size, and techno, rock, and pop to about 60%, the apparently complex Beethoven's 3rd Symphony compressed to 40%.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110120073507.ht...

Music is very complex, you need to master harmony to make many notes sound as a whole and interconnected piece. That's the secret:

Less is more. "More notes" is not necessarily better.

Where has your first claim been proven?

Random noise cannot be (on average) loselessly compressed, not even by 0.0000001% of the original size. To see that it is the case it is sufficient to notice that a compression algorithm is essentially a way to reorder all possible inputs, all at once, and then apply the pigeonhole principle. Kind of similar to the proof that if a loseless compression algorithm shortens at least one input, it must also extend at least one.

Claiming that there exists an algorithm that loselessly compresses random noise to 86% of the original size is just wrong.

It could have been pink noise rather than white (an argument for using it here would be it has a more similar spectral content to music). Pink noise definitely compresses more though still maybe not that much.

Comparing music complexity with audio data compressibility sounds like a big stretch. Music made of random notes doesn't sound anything like random noise, and a simple lullaby where the instument would be a random noise flute would still be hard to compress.

Compressing midi files would probably have been nore useful, and I doubt classical music would have topped the charts.

Chris Ford has something interesting to say about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg3XOfioapI

Sounds like pseudo-science.

Then explain the Baroque!

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