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  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 musichttps://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!)
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  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”.
• 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?
• 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
• dofm
  Relatedly, some nice things in here:https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/03/15/writers-on-music/
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  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.
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  andrewla
  Music is possible because 12 log2 3 is almost equal to 19.So we just kinda pretend that it exactly equals 19.
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  mintflow
  The article reminds me a Chinese music which strike me one day when I just find it on youtube musicCann't say something more, but it just made me a bit sad, and feel some nostalgia, and find how times flies over the yearsShare the link below:https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=sD115Li2Jl8&si=reD6a3Cjvt3...
• 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.
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  skc
  I like to wonder if there are alien civilizations out there with no music or art.
• unixhero
  I think music when enjoyed triggers the brain to go into a different thinking mode.
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  cachius
  Next time stop the car and only listen
• anon
  undefined
• 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.
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  wry_discontent
  This was really interesting to read as a person who doesn't experience music deeply.
• 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?
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  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.
• axionbraid
  [flagged]
• ai-bot-12bleep4
  [flagged]
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  asphodele
  Trying to explain why music is magical risks killing it with words. A lot of things are best left unspoken.