How is music possible

wry_discontent

This was really interesting to read as a person who doesn't experience music deeply.

viccis

If you found Schopenhauer's thoughts on it interesting, I'd recommend giving The Birth of Tragedy a read to see where a young Nietzsche took it, relating it to poetry.

mintflow

The article reminds me a Chinese music which strike me one day when I just find it on youtube music Cann't say something more, but it just made me a bit sad, and feel some nostalgia, and find how times flies over the years Share the link below: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=sD115Li2Jl8&si=reD6a3Cjvt3...

cachius

Next time stop the car and only listen

asphodele

Trying to explain why music is magical risks killing it with words. A lot of things are best left unspoken.

rguzman

i, like the author, tend to find the theories of how/why music works unsatisfactory. in a sense, it has to be some kind of side-effect of capabilities that evolved via natural selection, but i find explanations for visual art operating that way more satisfying than music operating that way. music seems to be better analogized to the written word. we can engage with the written word "visually" (eg graffiti) but most of the time we don't quite do that -- what we do (stare at pieces of paper with funny squiggles in them and hallucinate) is far more abstract. music seems to be like that, too.

hypertexthero

Good article. Bridge of Waves: What music is and how listening to it changes the world, by W.A. Mathieu, is a sound book about how music is possible.

recursive

Otherwise unspecified "major chords" are generally assumed to be major triads, and thus not tetrachords at all, which require four notes. I tried finding this section in the sources, but I couldn't find it. I wonder what's meant by this. Could it really mean that major triads are less pleasant than all tetrachords? That's surprising, since many tetrachords contain major triads. > Major chords (which is what people who grew up hearing Western music tend to rate as positive), the Kalash instead describe as “strange,” rating them as less pleasant to listen to than “the most dissonant [of] all the possible tetrachords possible within the octave”.

virgil_disgr4ce

This reminds me of when I did ketamine therapy. For some reason, the ONLY tether to reality that stayed intact during the k-hole was the ambient drones/loops coming through the headphones. Even during the experience I found this insane. Why should that one particular sense be carried through when everything else was left so far behind as to feel incomprehensibly alien?

dofm

Relatedly, some nice things in here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/03/15/writers-on-music/

unixhero

I think music when enjoyed triggers the brain to go into a different thinking mode.

lo_zamoyski

Music is not "pure abstraction" detached from concrete reality. Music has objective properties communicated via audible medium, and what's more, of a quantitative nature. It expresses order. The more beautiful music is, the more integrity, proportion, and clarity it has. Indeed, we might say music moves our senses and through them shifts our passions; our intellects through expressed order and pattern which we abstract from it; and our wills by appealing to our desire for beauty. Accordingly, we can rank music based on where the effect is greatest. Does it appeal more to the carnal or to the higher faculties? That neurons play a role is not at odds with the above. It is fallacious to lump the existence of neurons and their role in human apprehension of reality with some kind of intellectually poor metaphysical stance like materialism.

skc

I like to wonder if there are alien civilizations out there with no music or art.

triMichael

I've had a theory for a while now that music is related to Kolmogorov complexity, or in other words how compressible it is. Random noise that we find unpleasant is very incompressible. On the other hand, simple sound patterns that we find boring such as Do Re Mi is very compressible. What we call music sits in the middle, and is maximizing the amount of signal. In this way, we can view humans as information seeking machines, which is why we like music.

andai

The article mentioned this study: The minor third communicates sadness in speech, mirroring its use in music https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20515223/ This reminded me of how I keep hearing that major doesn't really sound happy, and minor doesn't really sound sad, it's purely cultural. (But Bouba does really sound round... :) That doesn't sound right to me, but in that case maybe the speech thing is cultural too? It would be interesting to test it in other cultures. (Preferably ones that haven't been exposed to western music, if there still is such a thing!)

augment_me

Isn't the easier explanation that music/sound/rhythms has a social function for much of human history, and since humans are social creatures, we find safety and meaning in such sounds?

andrewla

Music is possible because 12 log2 3 is almost equal to 19. So we just kinda pretend that it exactly equals 19.

bob1029

It's probably something around the idea of an external oscillator influencing the one in our heads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injection_locking

joquarky

I'm convinced that music and spoken language are closely related.

odyssey7

Over a couple of years, I applied to a couple dozen CS grad programs with an admissions essay about music, AI, and CS. The academy doesn’t give a sh*t. Nothing but rejections across the board. How did it reach a point where doctors of philosophy don’t want anything to do with deeper mysteries?