
What makes music sound “good?” - grimgrin
http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/whatmakesmusicsoundgood.html
======
Houshalter
I'm a fan of Juergen Schmidhuber's theory:
[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html)

The idea is that the brain finds it pleasing to learn things. It effectively
seeks novelty. Repetitive, predictable music does not sound pleasing. Pure
randomness also does not sound pleasing. Somewhere in between is novelty.
Patterns that are definitely real, but new. That somehow violate your brains
expectations.

~~~
tonyhb
Anecdotal but I feels as if that goes against standard chord progression,
keys, and almost all EDM.

Blues has a fairly strict formula in which most songs follow. Most songs are
in 4/4, and most modern music sounds fairly similar yet people are really into
it.

~~~
tzmudzin
Aren't those patterns and structures just there to avoid the cognitive
overload, while we're entertained by lesser variations?

(BTW, I believe we're overly simplifying by speaking of music as a single
entity. All of the elements you mentioned are a foundation in more popular
music, but good luck finding them in more modern or experimental genres.)

The cognitive effort to digest Schoenberg is different from that for a pop
song. Still, you can progressively familiarize yourself with a genre, and
relax on pieces that seemed hard and inaccessible earlier.

~~~
thirdsun
> Still, you can progressively familiarize yourself with a genre, and relax on
> pieces that seemed hard and inaccessible earlier.

Yes, as a passionate music collector and someone that can get lost in weird,
obscure and very leftfield music, this is something I notice all the time. You
start with something accessible only to find yourself enjoying obscure 70s
synth funk recorded on tape in someone's bedroom months/years later. Or
similar.

It's why we recommend "Kind of blue" whenever someone wants to get into Jazz,
which is difficult if you just randomly start...anywhere.

------
mehwoot
_I find it remarkable how musical the final result sounds._

Actually I find it remarkable how unmusical it sounds- when studying music
theory there are often very simple rules you're mostly meant to follow, yet
I've never heard any computer generated music that sounds even close to
passable. It seems surprising to me, I would have thought it would be easier.

~~~
lintroller
Does the computer generated music "compose" music based on music theory or by
learning from other songs? Much like literature, music can be good because an
artist tastefully broke the rules and typical norms. A song-writing algorithm
full of rule breaking will not necessarily create a song that fits the bill of
"good" music.

~~~
DefaultUserHN
>an artist tastefully broke the rules

Tastefully. That's the biggest problem with computers.

~~~
PeterisP
Sure, that's the big problem in automation of many endeavours - we can
automate things where it's objectively clear what's right and wrong, however
if the criteria for "good X" is literally "X that humans would like" (e.g. all
art) then you pretty much need a human in the loop, or try to simulate a human
_listener_ as opposed to a human composer.

If we had a magical black box oracle that could tell us that variation A is "5
good" and variation B is "5.5 good", then that would be sufficient to
implement a system that makes a lot of great art. But we don't, and possibly
can't without strong AI or something like that.

------
dahart
There are some interesting tidbits here, and I really like the table of
consistency versus consonance!

But overall, isn't this saying that removing the randomness and applying known
music theory is what makes music sound musical? Is there any insight that
using the computer is uncovering?

Randomness produces too much motion, and also fails to establish pattern or
theme. A set of random major chords still sounds very random, it doesn't
progress and leaves the listener unsatisfied. So many attempts at computer
music start from randomness and the proceed to remove it little by little with
structured rules -- maybe starting from randomness isn't the right place to
start?

Had a tiny epiphany about randomness recently when I edited a video with still
photos in it and applied my computer's "Ken Burns" effect, where it zooms &
pans slowly. The automatic version picks random start and end points, fairly
close together, and the movement is slow and gentle. But I watched it and
noticed it was very unfocused and adding unharmonious motion. Ken Burns is
telling stories with his pans & zooms - zooming in to highlight a specific
face he's talking about, or panning over to reveal a place. It was a pain to
re-edit the video manually, and hand-animate every pan & zoom, but when I was
done, I was completely shocked how much less motion there was, like an order
of magnitude less movement. The randomness had just scattered everything and
didn't go anywhere. That's what I'm hearing in these musical examples -
Brownian motion - too much movement that doesn't go anywhere.

------
Animats
There was something else like this on HN a few months back, but I can't find
it now. Like this generator, it generated music which sounded OK on a scale of
seconds. Lacking any higher level structure, after tens of seconds it was
clear the music wasn't going anywhere.

This is like generating sentences with statistical autocomplete. For a few
words, the phrases sort of make sense, but that illusion disappears with more
length. More high-level structure is needed.

Somebody will probably figure this out soon using deep learning and grind out
background music for movies. Oh, right.[1][2][3][4] (Juke-bot may be a hoax.)

[1] [http://juke-bot.com/](http://juke-bot.com/) [2]
[https://www.jukedeck.com/](https://www.jukedeck.com/) [3]
[http://www.athtek.com/digiband.html](http://www.athtek.com/digiband.html) [4]
[http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/](http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/)

------
anotheryou
That's what makes it sound "musical", not "good".

A lot in music breaks down to establishing patterns and breaking them. Simpler
music, like pop music relies heavily on well known patterns, but at least the
chorus usually has some element of surprise within the song.

My theory is, that people like music that is just a little (or for the more
adventurous a little more) surprising.

With training in listening to music, as a musician or just as an ambitious
listener, your taste will begin to widen to more complex music. This is
because you begin to recognize its patterns (and only when a pattern
establishes, you can break it to create suspense or surprise). Simpler stuff
will become very shallow, because it's so predictable (just remember the
shameful musical taste when coming of age).

Of course there is more to a pop song than harmony and melody, so even when
your taste becomes more sophisticated you might like a pop song for its
emotional appeal or some subtile complexity or depth the novice won't even
notice.

------
SNvD7vEJ
Sort of a Lorem Ipsum in music.

Listening to good music (as a non-musician) is for me mostly about experience
emotions.

Listening to this music leads immediately to be about identifying what rules
the generator was programmed to follow. The stricter the rules (less random),
the more music-like it may sound, but without any emotion. Except maybe
comedy.

------
acjohnson55
I first heard of Dmitri Tymoczko from his book A Geometry of Music [1], which
I found to be very enlightening.

This is a cool demo, although I suppose it shows a bit more where the basic
texture of western music comes from than songwriting. But what I find most
interesting about his ideas is how he's able to fairly convincingly connect
them to the entire western music tradition.

[1] [http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/geometry-of-
music.html](http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/geometry-of-music.html) (there's a link
to Amazon from that page)

------
joebergeron
Some of these audio examples remind me of a long night my freshman year at
MIT, when at around 7 AM, in delirium, my friend and I wrote a few hundred
lines of code in Matlab, yes Matlab, to procedurally generate music by
probabilistically moving from chord to chord based off of the frequency of
such changes in real music. Added some bass for counterpoint and some terrible
percussion synthesized from white noise and we had what we believed to be some
real bangers.

~~~
retox
And when you sobered up? :)

~~~
joebergeron
Quickly realized the true nature of what we had created. (That is to say,
piping hot garbage.)

------
dschiptsov
Evolutionary accident, perhaps. We have been conditioning for millions of
years to detect dangers and distinguish among sounds of nature. Obviously, the
sounds of bird songs and most of animal cries are in so-called major tonality,
while sounds of nature like wind, raining, thunderstorm, etc. are belongs to
minor. The swinging from one to another and variations on a theme are pleasant
to us the way natural bright colors are more pleasant than dull ones. Rhythm
is another main factor, and it probably has something to do with repetitive
patterns of behavior, the physiological phenomena behind some trance states
(which is related to sexual arousal that makes an animal numb) and rhythms
found in sounds of nature.

But, of course, it has nothing to do with harmonic series and other man-made
concepts of the mind.

------
grimgrin
I just bought a Roland JD-XI and not having an understanding of music theory I
was looking for anything that talked about What Sounds Good and Why.

I'd like to read more without really diving into music theory too far.

~~~
empath75
If you want to make music, but don't care about music theory, get a book
called The Art of Mixing.

It won't tell you how to write a song, but it'll start you with a solid
foundation for music production. You can start by just finding loops and
samples online and putting tracks together that way. Then you can start
replacing bits with original music. Think of it like learning how to program
by cutting and pasting code from stack exchange.

[https://www.amazon.com/Art-Mixing-Recording-Engineering-
Prod...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Mixing-Recording-Engineering-
Production/dp/1931140456)

------
ChuckMcM
I started thinking about computer music generation when I met Peter Langston
([http://peterlangston.com/Papers/amc.pdf](http://peterlangston.com/Papers/amc.pdf))
who was contracting with Sun doing audio work on the original 'project green'
star-9 device. There were many places where being able to play a tune of a
typical "flavor" but royalty free was required. I just thought it would be
nice to have continuously variable music on hold.

------
arthur_pryor
for most of the examples on that page, the first feeling i had was that it
sounded like a naive/paint-by-numbers version of free jazz/modern classical/a
tense passage in a movie score.

i thought the last clip was actually enjoyable, the busy clattering noisy one
with the effects and the variety of instrument sounds. there's plenty of weird
electronic music i listen to that's in that ballpark at times.

these clips would all make fine sample fodder.

i appreciate the attempted disclaimer at the end ('That is, "good" to typical
Western listeners'). but i think a lot of typical western listeners don't
realize how much things like texture (timbre, whatever) and other sorts of
things not easily captured by western classical music notation matter to them.
for instance, a lot of what makes old jazz sound like old jazz is that great
warm scratchy sound that the recording technology of the time necessarily
imprinted on the original recordings. likewise, if you scored autechre or
aphex twin and got an orchestra to play it, it might sound interesting or
enjoyable, but it wouldn't sound anything like autechre or aphex twin. and of
course, the intonation and cadence and syllable stretching of well delivered
rap vocals or well executed vocal sample chopping is nothing if not musical,
but those things aren't easily transcribed by the notation in question here
either. but those are all things regularly enjoyed by a wide swath of western
listeners. so i think the disclaimer should be more like 'That is, "good" to
the Western classical music establishment.'

------
pjdorrell
One hypothesis is that music has evolved to be "difficult" to compose, because
too much really good music would be bad for us:
[http://whatismusic.info/blog/OnTheDifficultyOfMusic.html](http://whatismusic.info/blog/OnTheDifficultyOfMusic.html)

------
getraf
I wonder if the people over at Brain.fm have seen this? After using the
service for a while, I've found it fascinating how they've managed to turn
"randomness into something recognizably musical" (I'm quoting Dmitri Tymoczko)
that I can then use to focus with.

~~~
dharlow
It's a large library of human-recorded loops, mixed and matched together at
random. There's essentially nothing in the way of automated music composition.

