[Fluffy]

I was watching my baby listening to music on baby tv, and I was trying to follow the music with an improvised "instrument" wondering is she will notice its kind of the same thing. And I wondered, why would we think that 2 similar rythms are alike?

The answer partially is that they both follow same pattern. What is good about same pattern? that they share info. When an info is shared you do not need to transmit it twice, only once suffice, and I am wondering, is that why we like music?

What I mean is, when many instruments follow 1 pattern, we can compress all the info regarding their behaviours into just 1. Saving brain power. And saving brain power is good, we know how human body is lazy as ***** and saves anything he can, and gets used to anything he can to save energies.

So saving brain power to transmit music is a good thing, and makes us happy, also matching all pieces into one makes us happy (like matching a group of boxes exactly into a container), because it is efficent. This also explains why the more we hear some musci the more we like it (we teach the neurones how to compress that specific info into less data by hearing it repeatedly), and also why we find it annoying when the piece is badly played/broke, as we then need more brain power to transmit all the info. Also why we find annoying music types that we are not used to, as we lack the compress system devices for simplifying the music data, but we end up "liking it more" if we hear it repeatedly.

Ths doesn't explain all, so it is just a partial theory, music is more complex but I'd say this "compress info" thing is a part of the whole thing.


Why do we end up disliking/hating songs that we use too much?, because we end up knowing them so well that we have many different patterns for exactly the same song, but they are differnt played on the raido, or different at another volume. In pattern recognition this is known as overlearning

[onoway]

I've never ended up disliking a song I've deliberately played over and over, just different and clearly inferior versions of it. Frequently if a different version comes on the radio I will go find the version I prefer to restore it to its proper status.

Also, not sure where emotional impact fits in with what you are suggesting, music clearly can affect mood and attitude. You can have equally repeating patterns and one is soothing and the other anything but.

On a radio show the other day the host pointed out that Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen broke all the rules for becoming a popular song. It doesn't have a refrain, doesn't repeat the melody and is at least 25%longer than is considered maximum. It was a favorite of many who would adamantly insist they "hated" opera.Yet it is one of the most successful pieces of the last 50 years, anyway. Why do some pieces enjoy huge popularity for a brief time and then sink into oblivion whereas other pieces survive for generations?

A bit of trivia from years ago.. milk cows and chickens both dropped significantly in production when radio stations in the barns were set to play hard rock/heavy metal but increased in production when they heard classical music. No idea what specific music was used. I wonder if they would all have quit entirely if the radio was set to nonstop news...

[mike777]

onoway, on 2014-October-24, 18:57, said:

I've never ended up disliking a song I've deliberately played over and over, just different and clearly inferior versions of it. Frequently if a different version comes on the radio I will go find the version I prefer to restore it to its proper status.

Also, not sure where emotional impact fits in with what you are suggesting, music clearly can affect mood and attitude. You can have equally repeating patterns and one is soothing and the other anything but.

On a radio show the other day the host pointed out that Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen broke all the rules for becoming a popular song. It doesn't have a refrain, doesn't repeat the melody and is at least 25%longer than is considered maximum. It was a favorite of many who would adamantly insist they "hated" opera.Yet it is one of the most successful pieces of the last 50 years, anyway. Why do some pieces enjoy huge popularity for a brief time and then sink into oblivion whereas other pieces survive for generations?

A bit of trivia from years ago.. milk cows and chickens both dropped significantly in production when radio stations in the barns were set to play hard rock/heavy metal but increased in production when they heard classical music. No idea what specific music was used. I wonder if they would all have quit entirely if the radio was set to nonstop news...

great post I wish you had gone further in saying what rules where broken and why we should care the rules were broken.

In other words perhaps the rules were crap...fully crap.

Any event your post was great when it comes to perhaps the rules are crap full of crap. I just hope they go further with more evidence but great post ty.

[mike777]

Fluffy, on 2014-October-12, 04:19, said:

I was watching my baby listening to music on baby tv, and I was trying to follow the music with an improvised "instrument" wondering is she will notice its kind of the same thing. And I wondered, why would we think that 2 similar rythms are alike?

The answer partially is that they both follow same pattern. What is good about same pattern? that they share info. When an info is shared you do not need to transmit it twice, only once suffice, and I am wondering, is that why we like music?

What I mean is, when many instruments follow 1 pattern, we can compress all the info regarding their behaviours into just 1. Saving brain power. And saving brain power is good, we know how human body is lazy as ***** and saves anything he can, and gets used to anything he can to save energies.

So saving brain power to transmit music is a good thing, and makes us happy, also matching all pieces into one makes us happy (like matching a group of boxes exactly into a container), because it is efficent. This also explains why the more we hear some musci the more we like it (we teach the neurones how to compress that specific info into less data by hearing it repeatedly), and also why we find it annoying when the piece is badly played/broke, as we then need more brain power to transmit all the info. Also why we find annoying music types that we are not used to, as we lack the compress system devices for simplifying the music data, but we end up "liking it more" if we hear it repeatedly.

Ths doesn't explain all, so it is just a partial theory, music is more complex but I'd say this "compress info" thing is a part of the whole thing.


Why do we end up disliking/hating songs that we use too much?, because we end up knowing them so well that we have many different patterns for exactly the same song, but they are differnt played on the raido, or different at another volume. In pattern recognition this is known as overlearning

I would gently suggest that as you get older you will know these songs less and less. The newer songs will be vapor....the older songs will be loved, they will be enjoyed.

[kenberg]

onoway, on 2014-October-24, 18:57, said:

A bit of trivia from years ago.. milk cows and chickens both dropped significantly in production when radio stations in the barns were set to play hard rock/heavy metal but increased in production when they heard classical music. No idea what specific music was used. I wonder if they would all have quit entirely if the radio was set to nonstop news...

We could update an old expression. If a song or program is particularly bad, we should say"It didn't lay an egg".

I guess for me asking why I like music is something like asking why I like rain. I just do. The first opera I ever saw was Madame Butterfly. That was fifty years ago and I still remember where I sat in the auditorium. I found it overwhelming. I like Hank Williams. I like Josh White. I like Emmy Lou Harris. I even like Frank Sinatra. I just like it.

[y66]

Here's one theory:

Quote

Why do we like music? Like most good questions, this one works on many levels. We have answers on some levels, but not all.

We like music because it makes us feel good. Why does it make us feel good? In 2001, neuroscientists Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre at McGill University in Montreal provided an answer. Using magnetic resonance imaging they showed that people listening to pleasurable music had activated brain regions called the limbic and paralimbic areas, which are connected to euphoric reward responses, like those we experience from sex, good food and addictive drugs. Those rewards come from a gush of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. As DJ Lee Haslam told us, music is the drug.

But why? It’s easy enough to understand why sex and food are rewarded with a dopamine rush: this makes us want more, and so contributes to our survival and propagation. (Some drugs subvert that survival instinct by stimulating dopamine release on false pretences.) But why would a sequence of sounds with no obvious survival value do the same thing?

The truth is no one knows. However, we now have many clues to why music provokes intense emotions. The current favourite theory among scientists who study the cognition of music – how we process it mentally – dates back to 1956, when the philosopher and composer Leonard Meyer suggested that emotion in music is all about what we expect, and whether or not we get it. Meyer drew on earlier psychological theories of emotion, which proposed that it arises when we’re unable to satisfy some desire. That, as you might imagine, creates frustration or anger – but if we then find what we’re looking for, be it love or a cigarette, the payoff is all the sweeter.

This, Meyer argued, is what music does too. It sets up sonic patterns and regularities that tempt us to make unconscious predictions about what’s coming next. If we’re right, the brain gives itself a little reward – as we’d now see it, a surge of dopamine. The constant dance between expectation and outcome thus enlivens the brain with a pleasurable play of emotions.

I'll bet your baby gets a rush when someone comes into her room or her part of the room and picks her up and that she can tell the difference between your footstep pattern and your wife's pattern and that she gets an additional rush when the person who shows up matches her expectation based on their footstep pattern. I'll also bet that if you could mimic your wife's footstep pattern perfectly, you would get more smiles when you show up at the crib. Just kidding.

[Fluffy]

onoway, on 2014-October-24, 18:57, said:

Why do some pieces enjoy huge popularity for a brief time and then sink into oblivion whereas other pieces survive for generations?

I think this has to do with styles, when a song follows a style you can predict the next part of the music, and when it rhymes you can predict part of the lyrics, so a good song using everything on fashion will become popular quickly. More so if it uses a popular singer that people are already used to. But when the fashion is gone...

fRegarding Bohemian rhapsody, or One (metallica) I consider them different songs pieced together rather than a big one.

[barmar]

As y66's quote says, much of the enjoyment of music comes from it following regular patterns, which the brain predicts and enjoys seeing the predictions fullfilled.

But we also enjoy some things that don't follow expectations. Jokes are examples of this. We also like story telling, where we don't know where something is going until we read/hear it. Bohemian Rhapsody is like a musical short story, and its breaks of convention can be liked to musical jokes (better examples of this are the music of PDQ Bach).