Music is a negative superstimulus for speech (2020)
whatismusic.info
whatismusic.info
Music is embodied, more so than speech. The real relationship between communication and some axiomatic irreducible form of human expression flows the other way.
Good literature is close to poetry, good poetry is close to music, good music is close to dance. And dance is the sublimation of sex or combat.
Communication as an artful expression, the closest thing to conveying Truth, comes from within, it precedes consciousness. Music is much closer to that than speech. We are much less human when without music, than we are when without speech.
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1. Truly spontaneous speech is un-musical.
2. The perception of non-spontaneity in speech suppresses the evaluation of truth.
3. When truth evaluation is suppressed, hypothetical emotions retain their full intensity.
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Or, put another way, "Spontaneous speech is un-musical. Musical speech suppresses the critical thinking in favor of emotion. Since musical speech allows circumvents critical reasoning, this allows for more intense emotional impact of music/musical speech".
If I've understood the hypothesis correctly, this gives the basis for understanding why music has (more) emotional impact than just speech.
[0] https://whatismusic.info/blog/TheNegativeSuperstimulusTheory...
I found this assertion confusing. Speech in say, English (just to narrow it down), is musical inherently. The pitch and rhythm of a speaking voice, especially how they change while an individual is speaking, is meaningful meta-information about what is being said, and how the speaker feels about it, or what they mean by what they say.
We _absolutely_ use the music of everyday speech to create emphasis, for example, and in many other ways. Actors use pitch and rhythm when speaking to convey emotions. It is often the musical content of speech that makes or breaks the performance. Mismatching speech melodies with the dialog sounds all wrong.
I dunno, 10 years or so ago I wrote a whole MA thesis on this exact subject. It's long enough ago (and I've not stayed in the field I was in) that I've long forgotten many of the sources, but there is plenty of stuff out there that deals with speech and music.
To veer off into pure opinion: I definitely think music gains some of its emotional impact by virtue of its relationship to speech, given that we can interpret so much from the music of speech itself, and if that kind of metadata is presented _independently_ of natural speech, there's often something pleasing or interesting about about that. We also are super good at listening for other meaningful sounds though, like things that might kill us.
My two cents is that music, like other art and things like sports or games, leverages senses, instincts, and skills that evolved initially for other purposes, and uses them recreationally, playfully. To varying degrees, humans seem to like stimulating and playing with their senses in different ways.
I'm not convinced that the attempt to explain it the way the author does is worthwhile. Parts of it ring true and parts of it (like the role of discerning truth and the claim that people don't musicalize their speech) I think are off track, and maybe also constrained by a far too limited perspective of what music is in the first place.
Models be built from something, something related to the modeler's interpretation of their own interface into reality.
That said, it's nice that such a model was made; it's a nice reference / jumping off point. Someone more sensitive to their percepts and the nuances of life would be hard pressed to formalize any model at all; they'd be hard pressed to unfocus from the complexities and responsibilities of social life to do the abstract work of modeling.
People who have congenital amusia, iirc, also tend to struggle with understanding tone languages. It seems true that if you aren't able to distinguish pitch well, you aren't good at encoding/decoding messages that are present through the medium of pitch differences.
I didn't mean to suggest above that this is a general thing for all humans. Like every other recreational stimulate-the-senses activity, some people don't actually care for it/aren't affected by it anyway.
Here's a small example, about how the minor third interval between two notes which is perceived as "sad" in Western music, is also present in English speech that sounds "sad" to the listener: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44642274_The_Minor_...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPRvxTjfOk
It's in our speech all the time. Preachers do exaggerate it. As do politicians and comedians, for example. But Diana pulls it right out of her own speech, and demonstrates that even children instantly recognize the musicality of it as soon as the bit of speech is repeated.
1. The listener determines the meaning of what the speaker said.
2. The listener determines the emotional significance of the meaning of what the speaker said.
3. The listener determines whether of not the speaker's speech is spontaneous.
4. The listener determines their belief about the truth of what the speaker said, but, the amount of effort put into this determination is proportional to the perceived level of spontaneity in the speaker's speech.
5. The listener responds to the speaker, where their response includes an indication of their belief about the truth of what the speaker said.
I think the truth-value part of this might be off track. Here's a slightly different hypothesis:
Speech carries two separate signals: information and emotion. The former is world-state data, and the latter is signal about the emotional state of the speaker. In a social species like humans, both are critical.
We might process those two channels of data with different parts of our brain even though the source signal has them merged together into one single sound. Imagine an audio processing pipeline that strips the literal informational content out and shunts it one way and takes the emotional affect another way.
The informational content needs to be processed actively with full attention from our frontal cortex. We have to pay attention to it. We don't seem to absorb detailed information "in the background" well. I don't know anyone who can, say, read a book and listen to a non-fiction podcast at the same time.
Emotional content doesn't need our active attention. It's something we can absorb passively. We use words like "feel", "vibe", "mood", and "ambience" to describe it.
OK, so you've got a speech-like sound that contains information and emotion. How do you decide how much attention to pay to it? Information is more likely to be useful if it's fresh, so sounding spontaneous is a positive signal for information content.
As the author supposes, music is a negative superstimulus for that. It's audio that contains no informational content and only emotion, which it telegraphs by sounding extremely rehearsed (repetitive rhythm, wide melodic swings). That lets our brain know that we don't have to pay active, logical attention to it. That's pleasant because it frees us to think about what we like while absorbing the music emotionally in the background.
This helps explain why some like me do like listening to music while programming, but not music with lyrics. Non-lyrical music helps me focus my attention on code because it sends a signal that I don't have to pay attention to it.
This may also explain why religions, cults, and demogogues use such sing-song like speaking styles: it encourages the audience to mentally switch off and not think as critically about what they are hearing as they might otherwise.
1) This hand waves away a key part conversations, the process of establishing sufficient shared meaning to pass information. This process is most obvious in its absence from comedic conversations where two characters talk past eachother (e.g. who's on first.)
4) The percieved "spontaneity" of a statement does not have any fixed relationship with the effort we put into verifying the truth of that statement. It's effects are minimal compared to our perception of the intent of the speaker in making the statement.
5) This is a mandatory part of conversations? I extremely rarely see people respond to statements is such manner.
Conversations are diverse and conversationalists follow many different models, sometimes even within a conversation.
As far as I can tell, the Author is so set on the "music is a super stimulus of speech" that they have post-hoc invented an unrealistic model to make their hypothesis work.
In reality, music, like most art, exploits a wide variety of perceptual and cognitive quirks while referencing a shared set of cultural experiences. Trying to boil this down to "music is a super stimulus of conversational speech" is simplistic and boring.
This is just bad pseudo-psychology from someone who wrote a whole "science" book on the topic without actually doing any actual science.
Also, I don't see a way to actively separate information and emotion while someone is communicating to you while still being able to fully understand...that would just mean you are not paying attention to at least one of the signals...but maybe that IS what is happening when people pay more attention to body language and tone over the actual content.
Perhaps a better way to think of the split is that some of the audio content needs to be processed deliberately and sequentially—it has grammatical structure, words that need to be decoded, semantics, etc. It requires processing from the part of our brain that needs to deliberately pay attention to things. It's like reading or doing math.
Meanwhile, some of it can be processed more intuitively. It's where we pick up tone and emotional intent. We will absorb that even if we don't deliberately focus on it—you can tell that someone is angry when they speak even if you don't know their language.
Of course, understanding both of those requires integrating them together. The lexical content of their speech might tell you why they feel a certain way or what they feel that way about.
But one way to look at music is that it's a sound artifact designed to deliberately convey "I'm almost all non-grammatical, it's OK to not focus on me."
Again, of course, this is all pure conjecture.
That can't possibly be true for actual information (in the Shannon sense).
When you say to someone "go to the grocery store and buy a soda", these words can't be just 7% of the total information. Or put another way, what exactly do you communicate in the other 93% (13 times more information)
In a sense, there is information to be had, whether or not you want or need to have it is totally up to you and perhaps the situation. Low stakes situations it probably matters less, negotiating with something big on the line would be a different story.
I think if humans always told the truth or could always express themselves fully in words, then yes, verbal communication would be a bigger chunk. But the truth is that humans can hide behind words or not know quite the right way to express themselves, but it’s much harder to do with tone and body movements.
Is the person smiling? Yelling? Pointing angrily? Making a motion like they are thirsty? Making puppy eyes? Laughing like it is an inside joke?
It can change from a mere friendly request to a demand possibly backed up by violence.
Surely way less than in the actual sentence, since you have millions of different posibilities for the words: go/store/soda
The speaker's motivation for that statement, the speaker's attitude towards the soda getter, the speaker's attitude towards soda, the implied outcome/motivation for the soda getter, the state of beverage availability and thirst in the immediate vicinity, the proximity of the store...etc
Every time someone says something we have to model what different interpretations imply about the mental state of the speaker, compare that with the recent conversational history, the tone and body language of the speaker (and other listeners), our knowledge of the speaker and the broader context. At the same time, each new statement can cause us to refine our past mental models of the speaker and reinterpret the interpretations based on those models.
Imagine a conversation with zero non-words information (a transcript).
Now one with zero words (mime game) .
Which one conveys more information?
Sometimes you can say far more with a single look than you can with mere words.
Type 1 aims to formally represent the world in patterns of symbols, with maximal simplicity. Type 2 aims to explore the complexity of the world, with maximal nuance. Type 1 finds value in constructing reductive models that are wrong but maybe useful to influence life in the world. Type 2 seeks freedom from models that reduce life into forms that can be easily influenced. To Type 1, the discovery of a computational model or equation or diagram that explains art or mysticism is a Holy Grail to pursue at all cost. To Type 2, art and mysticism are effectively defined as that which is inherently beyond the grasp of a formal model.
With such a gap in outlook and purpose, it's hard to communicate, to convey information that can be integrated across perspectives. Indeed, the gap is so large that the meanings and connotations of words like "reductive" and "wrong" are only worth quoting from a particular frame of reference.
Otherwise, nursing is very much a type 1 world of models that describe how nurses interact with the world around them.
This also applies to computing later (and still to this day) and pretty much everything else under the sun, including arts/liberal arts, for example: people who believed in the fundamental of beauty, complexity, hand-made craft, and some who would believe in the abstract notions, conveyed messages,etc.(you definitely see this throughout "modern art")
To me,making this distinction seems like the wrong approach.It's good and healthy for this divide to exist (because it's the premise of making something better, advancing a thought, otherwise you stagnate in one worldview) but it's wrong to assume one is better than the other, therefore everyone should adhere to this framework and abandon criticism).Moreover than that, people seem to be afraid to say: "I don't believe that, i think i can do better" when it comes to certain frameworks of thought.You definitely see stagnation on this kind in physics for example.
"Absolutely direct experience of the will is impossible, because it will always be mediated by time, but in first-personal experience of volition and the experience of music the thing in itself is no longer veiled by our other forms of cognitive conditioning."
There's also a less poetic, but I believe a more accurate definition in the blog you've linked:
"Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which doesn't know that it is counting." (Gottfried Leibniz)
We only know what the word "music" means from our own subjective experience of listening to specific examples of music.
At most we can observe common features of musical items, and include a description of those features in a definition. But such a definition will fall way short of accurately separating what is music from what is not music.
There are other subjective phenomena that we have words for, but for most subjective phenomena we have _some_ objective understanding of what is going on.
Music seems to win the prize for being both very familiar _and_ very mysterious.
> (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.)
I have invented 2 games:
- sing everything you have to say
- rap everything you have to say
Or maybe show the original image in addition to similar images (with one key element different in each one) and have the second group select the image that most closely resembles the description.
Any property, in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. So through a really powerful search process (read: artificial general intelligence) that can more efficiently explore remote, undiscovered regions of music-space, we could get music-patterns more alluring and emotionally stimulating than any currently imaginable.
What these songs would sound like is the real mystery. Would they sound anything like the music we're familiar with? Would they lead to musical wireheading [0]?
It also seems a bad idea to measure musical goodness by, say, how many times humans will replay a certain audio file. If you use this measure, I don't think you'll end with what you want at all.
See also:
"Siren Worlds And The Perils Of Over-Optimised Search." [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nFv2buafNc9jSaxAH/siren-worl...
There is a huge presumption here which is that all humans share the same reward maximization function. In other words, that culture, upbringing, personal history, and random variation don't strongly affect it. I don't see much evidence that this is true.
It's more likely that, yes, there are sounds that have profoundly great effects on people, but each has their own. I would be very surprised if some AI trained on a global dataset could produce a set of sinusoids that tickled my neurons to anywhere near the same degree as the sound of my daughter's voice saying she loves me, or the song I heard when I was falling in love for the first time.
Remember, each of us is our own unique highly mutable neural net too.
We are not that unique, some sounds tickle us all.
Selecting the least bad option to the greatest number of people is not the same as finding the maximum value for any given person.
I also wonder of the AI which creates it, then also creates the next level, the "music of the hyper-spheres", which it declares the best music ever conceived, but which to us sounds like white noise or like a random song made by a child playing with GarageBand.
You might reframe this as an adversarial attack. So far these are constructed against specific classifiers.
I wonder just how much common taste there is left to mine. There are a lot of low wattage brains working in an attention maximizing context (the music industry) on pleasurable audio.
How would this theory account for Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, for instance, or Hesiod's Works and Days? These are musical works, intended for singing, but they are also supposed to convey fairly detailed factual information to the listener.
We still use song for similar purposes today (e.g. in religious hymns) so this shouldn't be too surprising.
Except in musicals. Perhaps that's why there's a sort of uncanny valley feeling to watching people "spontaneously" burst into song.
I'm not sure this model explains why people like or even prefer music with no/incomprehensible vocals.
Speech is a superstimulus for something, it's probably a superstimulus for music. Music came first. Mimicry > Dancing > Music > Speech is my guess.
> In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. > (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.)
On this statement of his, however, I'd disagree. If you have ever watched the show Letterkenny, the banter is clearly musical. I have friends that went to school with the creators, and that style of south/central Ontario banter is very much a thing, we can do it on cue. Theatre people can have a certain way as well, where stories told by stage actors are often sonorous and rhythmic. Some British trained actors begin to speak from their lower registers (think Ian McKellen or Patrick Stewart)
Then again, maybe part of being a great presence as an actor is stupefying an audience with a musical voice. I've met hypnotist/NLP practitioners who work on rhythm and tone in their speech, and this could be construed as a technique for disarming and neutralizing critical faculties. Personally, the idea that there is an out of band way to mesmerize people by turning off their critical and conversational faculties using rhythmic musical intonation is too much existential horror for me to accept.
I'll stick to writing, thank you.
I sometimes try to sing my requests to my daughter when my willpower to repeat the request has run out. It never helps improve her response, but it helps me stay motivated.
"This was a triumph. I'm making a note here, huge success. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction."
An incredibly wrongheaded assertion made without a lick of evidence.
But that's not really the case. For example, junk food has been called a superstimulus compared with regular food. It stimulates us to eat it more strongly than the more nutritious fare our appetite evolved for, and thereby replaces regular food, to our detriment. It's not that it's better, simply that it's more stimulating, to the point of usurping the correct stimulant.
Music is a negative superstimulus in the sense that it causes the listener's brain to put less effort into processing the meaning of something.
He continues: "If this is the case, then speakers would be expected to exploit this perception by making their speech more musical in any situation where they are speaking and they want their speech to have more effect on the listener. But this doesn't happen."
To which I would say, in the first instance, that this is a very narrow view of how a superstimulus works. Porn has been called a superstimulus (being more pleasurable to some and usurping the role of physical sex.) But, according to this blogger, I can disprove that by asserting, "Porn can't be a superstimulant because if it were, people would routinely make themselves sexy to others by inviting them to watch porn videos."
But secondly I disagree that people never make their speech musical for added effect. Think about when your parents would call you as a child. "MAR-LOW...come take out the GAR-BAGE" in a sing-song voice for added effect.
Furthermore, music can entirely take the place of speech to provide a more stimulating environment. Many people would judge a party where music is playing to be more stimulating and pleasurable than a party where there is just conversation taking place.
But that aside, what he says is true that people don't generally sing to each other in the place of normal speech. But that's true for the same reason that people don't normally recite limericks to each other in the place of normal speech. Songs (and limericks) are not meant to be forms of spontaneous communication.
I also question the whole concept of a "negative superstimulus." He calls music a "worse speech than speech." But that's nothing special, it's how superstimuli typically work. In usurping the normal stimulant, they have a negative effect, or at least, lack the full range of beneficial effects that the normal stimulant would have.
And finally, using spontaneity as a measure of the effectiveness of communication, let's concede that point, for the sake of argument. Isn't everything that music lacks also lacking in the written word? In spoken prose and poetry? Essentially, in any non-spontaneous form of communication? In that case, why single out music? I mean, what he's calling "music" is music+lyrics, in any case. Is he asserting that reciting the lyrics without the accompanying music would enable listeners to ascertain the truth value? Or that just the accompanying music, without the lyrics, is not a ("negative") superstimulant?
> It's not that it's better, simply that it's more stimulating, to the point of usurping the correct stimulant.
By "better" he means exactly more positively stimulating. He's not saying it's morally superior. Our brains do instinctively perceive junk food as "better" than other food. That's why it takes so much willpower to not eat it all the time. It's why we "crave" it.
> But, according to this blogger, I can disprove that by asserting, "Porn can't be a superstimulant because if it were, people would routinely make themselves sexy to others by inviting them to watch porn videos."
I don't think this analogy holds together. If they are watching porn, they aren't finding you sexy any more than sitting a Big Mac on the plate next to the blanched kale makes the latter any more appealing. We do see that people increasingly take cues from porn and expect their real sexual partners to behave that way and have completely unrealistic, unhealthy expectations of what actual sex is like.
> Many people would judge a party where music is playing to be more stimulating and pleasurable than a party where there is just conversation taking place.
Yes, but the whole point is why? Why don't we attend parties with no background sound? That makes it easier to hear the people you are conversing with, which is clearly superior. Or, if it's because our brain enjoys the stimulus of speech, why don't we put on podcasts and documentaries during our parties?
> But that's true for the same reason that people don't normally recite limericks to each other in the place of normal speech. Songs (and limericks) are not meant to be forms of spontaneous communication.
Right. And if they aren't that... why do they exist?
> I mean, what he's calling "music" is music+lyrics, in any case. Is he asserting that reciting the lyrics without the accompanying music would enable listeners to ascertain the truth value? Or that just the accompanying music, without the lyrics, is not a ("negative") superstimulant?
He mentions lyrics, but his claim is not specific to lyrical music. He's asserting that music lyrics without music (i.e. spoken word) encourages the user to listen to it and think critically about its truth value instead of just implicitly taking it in. The more a piece of audio is musical and not lyrical, the less it triggers that response and the more comfortable we are simply perceiving it uncritically and emotionally.
Maybe. Yet I think he contradicts that with his own words: "This...suggests that music is not a superstimulus in the sense of music being a "better speech than speech". But, what if we suppose the opposite? What if we suppose that music is a "worse speech than speech"? What if we suppose that music is a superstimulus for some aspect of speech perception which involves a negative perception of the quality or usefulness of perceived speech?" [my emphasis] Here he seems to be directly equating better/worse as quality and usefulness judgments, not just in terms of the amplitude of the stimulus.
> but the whole point is why? Why don't we attend parties with no background sound?
My personal opinion is that it is basically a secondary channel of stimulus, something that provides people a baseline of entertainment value irrespective of the foreground conversation, and papers over the awkward or boring moments. To refer to it as a superstimulus for speech, whether normal or "negative," is a complete red herring in my opinion.
> He's asserting that music lyrics without music (i.e. spoken word) encourages the user to listen to it and think critically about its truth value instead of just implicitly taking it in.
Is that true? When I was young I'd spend hours trying poring over and deciphering the meaning behind various music lyrics. But plain poetry? It had to be assigned to me and even then I often found it boring and inscrutable. I'm sure others are different, but that's my point. I don't know how he can assert the universality of his own experience here.
>Songs (and limericks) are not meant to be forms of spontaneous communication. > Right. And if they aren't that... why do they exist?
As persistent forms of communication, for one. Just like writing and poetry, music can persist for generations and spread easily throughout preliterate civilizations. Anyway, my understanding is that as far as we know, music and speech processing developed in parallel in the human brain, and complement each other. That's why: 1) People who use tonal languages tend to have better musical pitch perception 2) Children who are taught music at a young age tend to have somewhat better language acquisition skills and 3) Musical training given to older folks can slow linguistic cognitive decline.
So I think if anything, the available knowledge indicates that music helps with linguistic understanding instead of detracting. He needs to give more than just his own bare assertions. For example, in the recent TV version of Asimov's "Foundation" there's a scene where a color-blind character has an advantage in hunting due to his lack of color perception. I believe that's drawn from reality. If there were a study that analogously showed that people with amusia (inability to process music) had an advantage in speech comprehension or in detecting falsehoods, that would be solid evidence in favor of this blogger's hypothesis.
Anyway, you gave me a great deal to ponder over, thanks for the detailed response.
- no experimental tests of theories
- massive reductionism of the complex emotional & cognitive phenomenon of music into low-level game theoretical optimizations
sorry, I don't see a reason to take this seriously. reminds me of jurgen schmidhubers "groundbreaking" theory of science, art, music, and humor [1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's nothing wrong with someone posting their ideas on a website. This forum is an internet watercooler, not an academic journal. Someone not being a specialist is no reason to shut down conversation.
I don't mean to pick too much on one comment and certainly not personally on the GP! This is just a common problem on the internet. What we want on HN is the kind of comments that enrich curious conversation. If you really don't think there is anything curiosity-gratifying in an article, that's what flags are for.
While I do agree, in general a lot of novel ideas get dismissed out-of-hand, a conversation about to what extent an idea engages with the existing community/literature around that idea is valuable. For example, if I saw a paper posted here that claimed it solved P!=NP, my first question would be as to how much it addressed the existing work, as mathematical ideas tend to attract cranks.
this article makes grand claims about how the brain works that are not backed up by any experiment or reference; it's reducing an extremely complex phenomenon - music and subjective experience of music - to a simple cognitive processing and meaning-making framework
The difference is here you say something a bit more specific about the content and topic of the article, whereas the GP comment didn't. Also, the style of what you wrote here is more conversational. The GP comment felt more like a pedantic putdown to me, although admittedly that is more of an interpretation.
Keep in mind that threads are super sensitive to initial conditions. Shallow dismissals often appear early in the life cycle of a discussion, precisely because they're so quick to jump to - and then we get a thread, and ultimately a culture, which is characterized by a mean dismissive spirit. Internet defaults already tend to mean dismissiveness, so we need to work to avoid that where possible.