Why monotonous repetition is unsatisfying
patterns.architexturez.net
patterns.architexturez.net
The best combination is to establish some patterns by repetition, then break these patterns and introduce new ones to keep the listener guessing, but the deviations should form a bigger pattern as well. It's the best when you can notice the pattern quickly, then before it gets boring it changes, and the new pattern feels like you could have predicted it - but you didn't.
The concept of tension and resolution is fundamental in music, and I think this is very closely related to expectation and surprise - and thus to repetition and pattern-breaking.
> "Intelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetition. While repetition without variation can easily produce monotony, juxtaposition of distantly related elements can easily degenerate into nonsense... Only so much variation as character, length, and tempo required should be admitted."
I'm not completely sure how this squares with the fact that I can listen to a song that I like dozens of times and still enjoy it, but I definitely understand it from the point of view of constructing an interesting work in the first place.
Well, it raises the question of: does listening to a non-repetitive song, repeatedly, make it repetitive? Is there a certain gap of time that, even if something repeats, that it no longer feels repetitive?
I'd say it's even over time trained to recognize the patters it encounters quicker, so the songs become MORE enjoyable the more you listen to them (up to a point).
The song “truck bed” [2] by Hardy has a similar longterm loop on the guitar part but it doesn’t last the entirety, it builds up to a release at the end.
Former radio dj so just think about these kinds of things a lot when listening to music.
However, I can tell you why we get bored easily when seeing repetition. It's that "we've grasped the pattern, it's very simple, and now we have more important things to do with our lives." Predicting the pattern isn't interesting anymore to anyone except maybe a kid for about 10 seconds.
As humans, our curiosity drives us to seek out new things so we can explain our surroundings. Randomness drives us crazy because we can't predict what happens, and thus our ability to "prevent bad things" is hampered. Even worse than randomness is a smart opponent, e.g. in chess, who thwarts our schemes by intelligently choosing a move based on preventing the traps we could lay. We may feel powerless at that point. But even more annoying, to the point of ANGER (a reaction that we and other primates resort to), is when the opponent makes sub-obtimal moves because they can predict what we are going to do, or quickly reacts to what we are doing, and therefore don't even bother defending against things it is confident we won't do. This is worse than us being able to predict things, it's worse than randomness, it's worse than optimal strategy, it's literally them "toying with us" and "cheating by predicting our very moves"!
The reason we feel anger and tend to escalate (e.g. quit the game, flip the board) at that point, is that we sense not only how much weaker we are but that the other side is "making fun of us", toying with us, we have no hope of "winning" but also we are in a dangerous situation since the toying can turn into something more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oue3pcmh-U0
Try it with other people and you'll see exactly this ladder...
Illustrated on the left by the Parthenon, with a row of eight identical pillars. This has a golden spiral overlaid to show that it's mathsy and natural. Halfway down the article there's a section "levels of scale" which asserts that the spacing of columns on temples is somehow magical and makes them alright, while modern columns are spaced differently and are all wrong.
But no, it's just a monotonous row of pillars. If it had no ancient history it would look kind of oppressive (the same way any charming old castle was originally a military installation built to exert control and spew out steel-clad troopers).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#The_Parthenon for more skepticism.
Meaning matters more than neurology, usually. We like stuff we've been made to feel attached to, culturally. But the article also mentions honeycombs. If we are going to talk about neurology, honeycombs will make some people (with trypophobia) very uncomfortable indeed, and the magical minor imperfections and irregularities of nature won't counteract that at all.
The main article's point about nested levels of repetition is interesting, and it introduced me to Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order books.
Oh, so it is! That's refreshing. I didn't expect the link to lead to an article at all, I expected to be invited to buy the book on Amazon.
I don't know, though. He comprehensively demolishes myths about the golden ratio except when promoting his own one. Those rectangular proportions won't lead to good architecture, but "The Golden Mean does apply to architectural composition in the context of scaling hierarchy that organizes complexity" because "Design is linked mathematically with natural growth through hierarchical subdivisions at distinct scales, which is found in a majority of natural structures." Ignore their woo-woo, try mine!
There is something very zen about the point at which you don’t even have to use your eyes anymore because the motions were so second-nature. Other people found it eye-wateringly boring but I thought it was peaceful.
* because repetition is offtopic on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...