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.
It is this way with all art. If you ask someone to describe a work which is “good art” or “well designed”, it usually takes longer to describe than things which are considered too simple (easily compressed) and also longer to describe than things which are considered too random (easily compressed). But not all things which take this Goldilocks amount of words to describe are considered well designed, just some of them. So art is also more than that.
How does this handle modern art which is very incompressible too? If we take your hypothesis then one could say modern art isn't good, which some do say.
There are things that can not be expressed in words, but which can still be expressed. Some of modern art lives within that gap.
Even traditional art often tries to do more than compress concepts, it tries to express the inexpressible.
Linguistic determinism/relativity (Sapir-Worf, etc) explains some of it. People can FEEL that their thoughts are being constrained by language, but they don't know how to express that and maybe don't even consciously realize that it's their real problem. They just figure out that art makes it feel a little better so they do art.
Van Gogh lived in the XIX century. How many centuries must pass before we stop calling that modern? What words should we use for things which are actually modern?
Modern art is a technical term in art history. Maybe 20th century art? But even then I'll bet people can find something made in the 20th century they like. Maybe they'll have to give us more info about what they mean by "modern art".
I know that. I’m arguing the term is dumb, since it waters down the natural meaning of words, making it harder to communicate effectively. Art historians should come up with a different, more specific term.
If anything, art history defines "modern" later than the real historical meaning ("modern art" starts in the 1860s after the invention of photography). In history modernity starts in the 1500s - in Western culture history is divided into ancient (dawn of civilization to fall of Rome), medieval (fall of Rome to the Renaissance) and modern (Renaissance to now). You'd need a fall of civilization or something to justify a new era.
One thing I have found in playing a lot of jazz off of lead sheets is that while you can really play some deep and idiomatic music in all the jazz forms, it's almost impossible to recreate much of modern rock by compressing it to a lead sheet.
Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.
Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".
And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.
What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.
With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.
I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.
But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).
While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.
My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.
Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.
With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.
Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.
But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.
So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.
So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.
While this might explain certain aspects of music, it doesn't explain the strong emotional reaction that music produces, even without lyrics. Kolmogorov complexity can't explain why Ode to Joy evokes so different feelings from Requiem, and why these feelings generally persist if you play the same notes with the same timings on very different instruments.
Theres a simple explanation! Our brains recognize these patterns in everyday life and thus associate them to certain events weve experienced that employed the same or similar patterns of thinking
A fast BPM song alone would be indicative of events where things are happening fast and quickly.
Compression requires prediction, and good music seems to require a balance between predictability (repetition) and novelty. This can be seen in even the simplest (verse/chorus) song structure.
And I guess this is why I don't like Free Jazz. It sits close to the random noise side of the spectrum. I guess other people can feel the patterns in it.
I play quite a lot of jazz, among other things. On several instruments, mostly clarinet lately by I've performed with bands large and small on piano and upright bass.
Having participated in a lot of free improv music (one of my cohort has a grammy related to it), I am not sure if there really are a lot of patterns going on there. I am not a fan and it doesn't feel fun for me in the way that sitting with a band and playing Django-style music ("Tears" or "Swing 42" or "September Song").
I don't think it's a noise thing, I think there just isn't much "signal" getting compressed so the decoders are doing way more than they should.
I suspect, though, that many of those patterns are inaccessible by an audience, or even the other musicians. Or sometimes to the person performing said patterns.
Musical notes are pretty well defined sound frequencies. The medium which carries that sound wave is irrelevant. You can even get yourself a pair of bone conduction headphones, which would work for listening to music even if you were in a vacuum - since ultimately what matters is the sound wave hitting your ear bones, thr air is just the most common way for it to happen.
Of course, the sound that non-electrical instruments make is indeed dependent on the atmosphere in which they are played, assuming the same motions etc. You could probably make a violin produce the exact same sounds that it does on Earth playing it on Mars, but you'd have to play it differently than you do here. But even this doesn't apply to electrical instruments - Jimi Hendrix would sound the same if he could somehow play on the surface of Mars.
The longer I live, the more I feel air and water are similar in that regard. Fish live in water, we live in air which is less sticky. If air was stickier, more species could fly since flying and swimming are basically similar things but water molecules seem to pack tighter (that’s my guess at least) so when you displace it, you can generate a force (e.g. by flapping).
In that sense, I think any form of atmosphere, it will have its own music but it would probably not sound great in other atmospheres.
There are some fundamental differences between liquids like water and gases like the air, they're not a continuum - moving from a liquid state to a gaseous state is a phase change, and comes with a huge, and measurable, energy cost (getting 1 kg of liquid water from 0C to 100C takes as much energy as converting that water entirely into water gas at 100C). Note that evaporation is different - it's just tiny bits of liquid water flying away.
Also, any atmosphere can carry any sound wave for at least some distance. It takes more or less energy to do so, and if the medium attenuates rapidly, you have to start with higher frequencies so that the right frequency reaches your audience, but that's it. You need different instruments to play in different atmospheres, sure, but not different music. And electrical instruments actually work exactly the same regardless of the medium.
The term you are looking for is viscosity. Water has higher viscosity than air. Honey and syrup even higher still. It basically describes how "thick" the medium is, or to be a bit more precise, how much it resists forces applied to it.
Sure it does! The listeners of such music have listened to lots of other music, and have developed a mental model of it that is overly predictive (too compressible) to be interesting to the information-seeking machine.
It is also possible that people are listening to the music for reasons other than the music itself (community, feelings of superiority, etc.)
A thing it’s simple patterning. Listen to the same random music on a cd and it becomes a pattern. The more discernible the pattern the more popular the music.
When you say clicks-and-beeps are you talking about music like Skrillex, Alva Noto, Aphex Twin or do you mean something else?
Either way, it sure does explain the popularity. If you consider it as predictability instead of compression, it might make more sense. Listeners have an expectation on what music sounds like and popular music is going to ride that line between the listeners expectations and something more original and stray from those expectations.
I think this could also be why AI music is so bad, because it can hit the listener's expectations, but the ways that it strays from them are seemingly random, which is why a big reason to why it is so uncanny.
I imagine they might mean more like either early video game music (the kind produced by the same synthesizer the BIOS uses to emit beeps) and the style that mimics that, or extreme minimalism experiments in various musical disciplines.
I don't know. I'm inclined to think that it's more visceral. At least a good part of its appeal, and the oldest. There's the famous example of slaughterhouses using calm, predictable music and consonant harmonies to calm their animals.
I've read a paper which had a similar theory - music is a reward hack for the brain - the brain is a prediction machine, and it gets rewarded when it correctly predicts stuff. Music is highly predictable due to it's rhythmic mathematical structure, thus very easy to predict, with a lot of content to predict (hundreds of events per minute) thus you get a lot of reward from it.
As an example, EDM music is highly predictable, and highly popular.
African tribal drum music is also highly predictable, while also being complex in poly-rhythmic ways.
Interesting. I think there is a relationship to expectations/predictability but we also enjoy subversion of those expectations like syncopation in a second verse or bridges, etc.
> and it gets rewarded when it correctly predicts stuff.
Yet it's way more fun if the music evolves and takes twists you don't expected. I actually get quite aggressive from to predictable music, basically most modern pop music, but I guess that's highly subjective. For me good music must be intellectual exhaustive.
triMichael 1 day ago
LEDThereBeLight 1 day ago
satvikpendem 1 day ago
mapontosevenths 1 day ago
Even traditional art often tries to do more than compress concepts, it tries to express the inexpressible.
Linguistic determinism/relativity (Sapir-Worf, etc) explains some of it. People can FEEL that their thoughts are being constrained by language, but they don't know how to express that and maybe don't even consciously realize that it's their real problem. They just figure out that art makes it feel a little better so they do art.
otabdeveloper4 22 hours ago
amanaplanacanal 20 hours ago
throw7488578 18 hours ago
amanaplanacanal 17 hours ago
Here are some example 21st century painters: https://medium.com/@John_Dalton/living-masters-the-top-13-re...
throw7488578 15 hours ago
rcxdude 15 hours ago
LocalH 5 hours ago
jhbadger 2 hours ago
scarecrowbob 15 hours ago
Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.
Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".
And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.
What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.
With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.
I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.
But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).
While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.
My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.
Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.
With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.
Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.
But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.
So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.
So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.
tsimionescu 22 hours ago
andoando 16 hours ago
A fast BPM song alone would be indicative of events where things are happening fast and quickly.
E-Reverance 15 hours ago
mr_toad 19 hours ago
rererereferred 17 hours ago
scarecrowbob 15 hours ago
Having participated in a lot of free improv music (one of my cohort has a grammy related to it), I am not sure if there really are a lot of patterns going on there. I am not a fan and it doesn't feel fun for me in the way that sitting with a band and playing Django-style music ("Tears" or "Swing 42" or "September Song").
I don't think it's a noise thing, I think there just isn't much "signal" getting compressed so the decoders are doing way more than they should.
andoando 13 hours ago
scarecrowbob 9 hours ago
I suspect, though, that many of those patterns are inaccessible by an audience, or even the other musicians. Or sometimes to the person performing said patterns.
4dregress 1 day ago
If you could hear music on the surface of Mars without a space suit, I’m pretty sure it would sound quite different.
tsimionescu 23 hours ago
Of course, the sound that non-electrical instruments make is indeed dependent on the atmosphere in which they are played, assuming the same motions etc. You could probably make a violin produce the exact same sounds that it does on Earth playing it on Mars, but you'd have to play it differently than you do here. But even this doesn't apply to electrical instruments - Jimi Hendrix would sound the same if he could somehow play on the surface of Mars.
mettamage 23 hours ago
In that sense, I think any form of atmosphere, it will have its own music but it would probably not sound great in other atmospheres.
tsimionescu 23 hours ago
Also, any atmosphere can carry any sound wave for at least some distance. It takes more or less energy to do so, and if the medium attenuates rapidly, you have to start with higher frequencies so that the right frequency reaches your audience, but that's it. You need different instruments to play in different atmospheres, sure, but not different music. And electrical instruments actually work exactly the same regardless of the medium.
VorpalWay 23 hours ago
comrade1234 1 day ago
peterlk 1 day ago
It is also possible that people are listening to the music for reasons other than the music itself (community, feelings of superiority, etc.)
detourdog 1 day ago
wyre 1 day ago
Either way, it sure does explain the popularity. If you consider it as predictability instead of compression, it might make more sense. Listeners have an expectation on what music sounds like and popular music is going to ride that line between the listeners expectations and something more original and stray from those expectations.
I think this could also be why AI music is so bad, because it can hit the listener's expectations, but the ways that it strays from them are seemingly random, which is why a big reason to why it is so uncanny.
tsimionescu 23 hours ago
xhevahir 1 day ago
dist-epoch 1 day ago
As an example, EDM music is highly predictable, and highly popular.
African tribal drum music is also highly predictable, while also being complex in poly-rhythmic ways.
skinfaxi 1 day ago
1718627440 1 day ago
Yet it's way more fun if the music evolves and takes twists you don't expected. I actually get quite aggressive from to predictable music, basically most modern pop music, but I guess that's highly subjective. For me good music must be intellectual exhaustive.
PaulDavisThe1st 1 day ago
RationPhantoms 1 day ago
xpct 1 day ago
jacquesm 1 day ago