Repetition Makes Music Beautiful [video] | Hacker News Reader

Repetition Makes Music Beautiful [video]

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It's not repetition, it's the deliberate creation of a comprehensible perceptual model which lives in the sweet spot between trivial prediction and surprise.

Repetition is one way to enhance predictability. Stock musical transformations - modulation to a related key - are another.

This is a known thing in perceptual psychology, based on something called the Wundt Curve.

Too little novelty is boring. Too much novelty is incomprehensible and frustrating. Just the right amount is an enjoyable sweet spot.

Of course this varies for different listeners. If you're a fan of modern "squeaky door" contemporary classical music you're going to demand a very complex and unpredictable experience that pop fans find unbearably unmusical - and vice versa.

> It's not repetition, it's the deliberate creation of a comprehensible perceptual model which lives in the sweet spot between trivial prediction and surprise

Exactly!

The sweet spot between repetition and non-repetition - I cal it evolving repetition (same base but minor different touches or changes that evolve the pattern over time) and having different layers doing it - keeps the listener intrigued instead of bored, still keeping the predictability but giving the element of surprise.

> I cal it evolving repetition ...

In EDM you would use the word 'progressive' [house|trance].

Well, the use of `progressive` depends on the surrounding context - is it progressive in terms of genre progress or progressive as in the track scope? But yeah, as I understand, you're aiming at the second context - which is pretty much to what I'm aiming at, but with less explicit emphasis on progression itself.

Yes! "trivial prediction vs surprise" ... which relates closely to tension and release

Sadly "pleasant to listen to" and "interesting" can diverge if you become more of a music snob. That's something that really bothers me :)

An old saying (old to me anyway) regarding improvising in music is that if you make a mistake, just keep repeating the mistake- it will sound deliberate. It’s surprisingly effective.

I've heard it said as: "if you do it once, it's a mistake. If you do it twice, it's jazz."

Not just improvising. Its a bit of old gag...if you make a mistake just do it again and pretend you meant it (if its "outside" claim to be playing jazz).

Just add some lo-fi rain samples and vinyl distortion on to and you can pass off your mistakes as "retro vibes"!

Just use a delay pedal, and the machine automatically legitimizes it for you. It's magic!

This tactic is also effective when you make grammatical/pronunciation errors in speaking.

He changed the chords that the audience selected and reordered them, first off. Furthermore, the demonstration does not prove or even suggest the thesis that "repetition is what makes music beautiful", the end result being of questionable beauty, the element of repetition being unclear (is he referring to the looping, or the priming effect on the audience having heard it already, or something else?), and the relevance of the demo excerpt to the beauty or repetitiveness other music is left completely unaddressed.

It's an Ableton ad disguised as a ted talk.

It worked, I was like 'what program is that?' and found Ableton Live. I then said 'What is the free software alternative?' and found LMMS and Ardour. Go with the free software folks.

I subscribed to Ardour for a while so that I could get the macOS version and the amount I paid towards Ardour I could have bought Logic Pro X that does about 500% more, including functioning MIDI, sorry to say. At the time Ardour did not have this, nor half of the other features I needed just for basic mixing and editing.

Ardour development obviously has a very small team so they are constrained, but I am not sure going to Ardour simply because it is free software is a good reason if you actually want to get stuff done.

Perhaps it has come on a lot since I used it. It relied on Jack under macOS when I used it, I think, which seemed odd to me instead of native audio bindings.

I assume they use Jack so they don't have to maintain separate OS-specific code (for audio, that is quite a significant task).

True. It was obviously a bit more awkward to use, that was all.

Having said that, it was less frustrating that on Linux for me but that was back in the days of PulseAudio being garbage and Jack dropping samples left, right and centre on my sound card (using the ice module I think?).

Anyway, I was just saddened by the money I spent on it versus the output I received. I ended up going to Logic Pro instead.

EDIT: I wasn't trying to minimise the Ardour project's efforts BTW. It is a valiant effort and a monumental undertaking but I was more interested in making/recording music than software for that venture.

He's speaking at an Ableton user event; the audience is Ableton users.

I believe you're being unfair. Extending the chords is fair and so is voicing them to be close to each other. Neither of those count as "changing" the chords and the musicians in the audience knew this.

Adding 7ths and 9ths certainly is changing the harmony, as is changing a diminished to a half-diminished chord (which also changes its function), so that element of the criticism is true and warranted. As for "fair", I think having one's (many people's!) time wasted by baiting them with a false promise, only to present them with something likely to produce confusion and frustration, is unfair.

Many years ago I was playing with a music creation application. On a lark, i button mashed and created a random sequence of dissonant chords of random lengths. It sounded as awful as you would expect. I took this sequence and repeated it several times. About 15 years later I can still remember exactly how it sounded, and remember it eventually becoming pleasant to my ear.

I can somehow relate to this. You know that Human Music from Earth Radio (1)? I only listened it once and now I can't get it out of my head.

Don't know why my brain thinks it's significant enough for maybe my survive(???).

I don't even like it.

1: https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Human_Music

Original human music song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S1jWdeRKvvk

With repeated notes/chords and drums this becomes... music! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OB2ekdVqPnk

Haha, maybe more of us have had this experience than I thought. My parents bought me a little electronic keyboard when I was young and lots of times I would play some sequence of notes and they'd suddenly sound really nice. Like I'd made something. Well, I had no music theory so it was probably just total crap that had started sounding nice to me.

If you by chance played all of the white keys only, it would sound "nice" because you are playing the C major scale.

> and remember it eventually becoming pleasant to my ear

I have a similar experience with quarter-tone music. I used to experiment with it a little bit and created a short theme[0] for one of my characters that utilized multiple quartertones, as opposed to just semitones that are used in usual Western music.

I remember that it sounded alien and way off when I created it and shortly afterwards. Now, it sounds... ordinary. I got used to it and found enjoyment in how it sounds.

[0] https://soundcloud.com/phoe-krk/solyre - sorry for the shameless plug, providing this for reference.

Given that I know close to nothing about musical theory (or playing music), this talk surprised me. It seems that our minds are simply wired to pick up patterns and to try to make order out of randomness. I was reminded of 'Musicophilia' by Oliver Sacks, that I think is worth checking out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia

Key takeaway from the video "repetition legitimizes".

i remember when i first heard that watching an Adam Neely video and it really struck me just how powerful and salient a claim it is. everything that we have come to expect of all aspects of existence is only that way because it has been repeated enough to have been made a fact of reality, and then progressively iterated upon over time with each iteration repeated until accepted. so it makes perfect sense within the context of music imo and is quite a useful tool to have in one's belt

everything that we have come to expect of all aspects of existence is only that way because it has been repeated enough to have been made a fact of reality

What does this even mean? Repeated enough to become a fact of reality? So before it was a "fact of reality" it was being repeated, but.. wasn't yet reality? Until it was repeated enough, and then it became a fact of reality?

Who is swayed by this kind of false deepness?

Ironic in light of your username, but what the comment you're responding to is talking about is the experience of reality rather than reality itself.

In the context of learning, and of survival, it's counterproductive for the brain to spend time and energy on outliers instead of what is consistent. The brain has a lot of innate capabilities at birth, but whatever reality the person experiences shapes them, whether it be language or culture. And unless the experience is traumatic, isolated instances get subsumed under the volume of everyday experience -- outliers are noise and repetition is signal.

yes this is precisely what I was talking about. I suppose that I could have been more clear or precise with how I worded my comment but i felt like it was clear enough that I wasn't necessarily talking about objective reality but rather the personal experience of reality. thank you for chiming in and clarifying for me, and thank you for making an attempt to understand what I was trying to say rather than taking every word at face value. nuance on the internet is definitely an NP-Hard problem, both transmitting and receiving it would seem.

I had a mild eureka moment when I read your initial comment. In a way it is obvious, how could things work otherwise? But linking reality (as a function of experience) and music is an interesting concept, and one I think has been explored quite a bit, but I've not seen anything to do with repetition being the binding concept.

I've recently become more interested in music which is probably why this resonated with me. A lot of the conventions of music, repetition included, I consider necessary evils. Like any creative endeavor, there is no correct music, but I see how it could be fruitful to explore this further.

as the response to your comment said, I indeed was speaking of the experience of reality rather than reality itself. I'm not entirely sure why you ask who is swayed by this sort of "false deepness" as to me that implies that I'm trying to inculcate others into my manner of thinking (which I suppose one could argue is a big aspect of rhetoric), when really the thing is is that I was just sharing what was on my mind in hopes of sparking a conversation with others who may or may not agree with me, hopefully to get their perspective and increase my understanding of how others experience reality. Which obviously happened seeing as you shared your perspective on it, so mission accomplished, I suppose. I just feel that the way you presented your perspective came across as unnecessarily hostile and almost as if you just found something you didn't like about the wording of it so you chose to dissect that and then use it as an example of what you would designate as "false deepness".

also: just because something has not yet been established as "fact" doesn't mean that it is not yet reality. merely that there is not an acceptable amount of certainty with regards to that pattern of behavior, or whatever the case may be, to establish it as a "normal" or "expected" manner in which reality might manifest. however, I'm fairly confident that even that verbiage won't be good enough as I wouldn't be surprised if you've already formulated a specific idea of who I am and what I'm trying to do by saying these things based off of your response :)

It's more about bending and shifting said repetition IMO.

How then do we explain some listeners’ aesthetic responses to pure noise, e.g. Merzbow or other artists from the Japanese or Detroit noise scenes?

Is this a grand unified theory of beauty, or an attempt to explain how melodies work with your brains pattern recognition? I think the latter, so surely there are other mechanisms of generating aesthetic responses. I certainly enjoy both Bach fugues and industrial noise experiments, although in quite different ways.

Similar to "The Lick" in improvisational jazz. Seven or Eight specific notes, heard in so many different songs and genres:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krDxhnaKD7Q

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lick

Seems reminiscent of the work of Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, sympathetically reviewed here (http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2014/repetition-defines-music/) — I believe her work has been on HN before, but a quick search does not turn it up.

Another good example of repetition that gets pleasantly hypnotic

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw

The original song is pleasant, "Lady in Red," by Chris de Burgh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HMDUtirtJM

idk. it sounded chaotic and the underlying rhythm made it listenable.

Or you could rephrase to say - it sounded like jazz.

Prime numbers are important in music. They're actually random. Repetition of this randomness makes music beautiful.

2 and 3 are, but that's about where it ends. Yeah you can do subdivisions of 5 and 7 but it starts to be an academic exercise at that point. So, no, prime numbers don't have any special relationship to music, sorry. Factors of 12 and 16 are actually the most common and useful groupings in most music that people can dance to.

On this last point, I recall reading an in-depth article (whose title I've forgotten..) about the importance of highly divisible numbers in music.

12 has a wonderful property of being variously composable by 2, 3, 4, 6 - and one reason why it's so commonly used in music is that it's not a prime number.

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