
Repetition Makes Music Beautiful [video] - howrude
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDA5Nmf8e88
======
TheOtherHobbes
It's not repetition, it's the deliberate creation of a comprehensible
perceptual model which lives in the sweet spot between trivial prediction and
surprise.

Repetition is one way to enhance predictability. Stock musical transformations
- modulation to a related key - are another.

This is a known thing in perceptual psychology, based on something called the
Wundt Curve.

Too little novelty is boring. Too much novelty is incomprehensible and
frustrating. Just the right amount is an enjoyable sweet spot.

Of course this varies for different listeners. If you're a fan of modern
"squeaky door" contemporary classical music you're going to demand a very
complex and unpredictable experience that pop fans find unbearably unmusical -
and vice versa.

~~~
thecupisblue
> It's not repetition, it's the deliberate creation of a comprehensible
> perceptual model which lives in the sweet spot between trivial prediction
> and surprise

Exactly!

The sweet spot between repetition and non-repetition - I cal it evolving
repetition (same base but minor different touches or changes that evolve the
pattern over time) and having different layers doing it - keeps the listener
intrigued instead of bored, still keeping the predictability but giving the
element of surprise.

~~~
degski
> I cal it evolving repetition ...

In EDM you would use the word 'progressive' [house|trance].

~~~
thecupisblue
Well, the use of `progressive` depends on the surrounding context - is it
progressive in terms of genre progress or progressive as in the track scope?
But yeah, as I understand, you're aiming at the second context - which is
pretty much to what I'm aiming at, but with less explicit emphasis on
progression itself.

------
LeonB
An old saying (old to me anyway) regarding improvising in music is that if you
make a mistake, just keep repeating the mistake- it will sound deliberate.
It’s surprisingly effective.

~~~
paloaltokid
I've heard it said as: "if you do it once, it's a mistake. If you do it twice,
it's jazz."

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prvc
He changed the chords that the audience selected and reordered them, first
off. Furthermore, the demonstration does not prove or even suggest the thesis
that "repetition is what makes music beautiful", the end result being of
questionable beauty, the element of repetition being unclear (is he referring
to the looping, or the priming effect on the audience having heard it already,
or something else?), and the relevance of the demo excerpt to the beauty or
repetitiveness other music is left completely unaddressed.

~~~
solipsism
It's an Ableton ad disguised as a ted talk.

~~~
mempko
It worked, I was like 'what program is that?' and found Ableton Live. I then
said 'What is the free software alternative?' and found LMMS and Ardour. Go
with the free software folks.

~~~
72deluxe
I subscribed to Ardour for a while so that I could get the macOS version and
the amount I paid towards Ardour I could have bought Logic Pro X that does
about 500% more, including functioning MIDI, sorry to say. At the time Ardour
did not have this, nor half of the other features I needed just for basic
mixing and editing.

Ardour development obviously has a very small team so they are constrained,
but I am not sure going to Ardour simply because it is free software is a good
reason if you actually want to get stuff done.

Perhaps it has come on a lot since I used it. It relied on Jack under macOS
when I used it, I think, which seemed odd to me instead of native audio
bindings.

~~~
telesilla
I assume they use Jack so they don't have to maintain separate OS-specific
code (for audio, that is quite a significant task).

~~~
72deluxe
True. It was obviously a bit more awkward to use, that was all.

Having said that, it was less frustrating that on Linux for me but that was
back in the days of PulseAudio being garbage and Jack dropping samples left,
right and centre on my sound card (using the ice module I think?).

Anyway, I was just saddened by the money I spent on it versus the output I
received. I ended up going to Logic Pro instead.

EDIT: I wasn't trying to minimise the Ardour project's efforts BTW. It is a
valiant effort and a monumental undertaking but I was more interested in
making/recording music than software for that venture.

------
mordymoop
Many years ago I was playing with a music creation application. On a lark, i
button mashed and created a random sequence of dissonant chords of random
lengths. It sounded as awful as you would expect. I took this sequence and
repeated it several times. About 15 years later I can still remember exactly
how it sounded, and remember it eventually becoming pleasant to my ear.

~~~
nirui
I can somehow relate to this. You know that Human Music from Earth Radio (1)?
I only listened it once and now I can't get it out of my head.

Don't know why my brain thinks it's significant enough for maybe my
survive(???).

I don't even like it.

1:
[https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Human_Music](https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Human_Music)

~~~
moconnor
Original human music song:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S1jWdeRKvvk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S1jWdeRKvvk)

With repeated notes/chords and drums this becomes... music!
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OB2ekdVqPnk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OB2ekdVqPnk)

------
leto_ii
Given that I know close to nothing about musical theory (or playing music),
this talk surprised me. It seems that our minds are simply wired to pick up
patterns and to try to make order out of randomness. I was reminded of
'Musicophilia' by Oliver Sacks, that I think is worth checking out:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia)

------
lalos
Key takeaway from the video "repetition legitimizes".

~~~
ozzmotik
i remember when i first heard that watching an Adam Neely video and it really
struck me just how powerful and salient a claim it is. everything that we have
come to expect of all aspects of existence is only that way because it has
been repeated enough to have been made a fact of reality, and then
progressively iterated upon over time with each iteration repeated until
accepted. so it makes perfect sense within the context of music imo and is
quite a useful tool to have in one's belt

~~~
solipsism
_everything that we have come to expect of all aspects of existence is only
that way because it has been repeated enough to have been made a fact of
reality_

What does this even mean? Repeated enough to become a fact of reality? So
before it was a "fact of reality" it was being repeated, but.. wasn't yet
reality? Until it was repeated enough, and then it became a fact of reality?

Who is swayed by this kind of false deepness?

~~~
michrassena
Ironic in light of your username, but what the comment you're responding to is
talking about is the experience of reality rather than reality itself.

In the context of learning, and of survival, it's counterproductive for the
brain to spend time and energy on outliers instead of what is consistent. The
brain has a lot of innate capabilities at birth, but whatever reality the
person experiences shapes them, whether it be language or culture. And unless
the experience is traumatic, isolated instances get subsumed under the volume
of everyday experience -- outliers are noise and repetition is signal.

~~~
ozzmotik
yes this is precisely what I was talking about. I suppose that I could have
been more clear or precise with how I worded my comment but i felt like it was
clear enough that I wasn't necessarily talking about objective reality but
rather the personal experience of reality. thank you for chiming in and
clarifying for me, and thank you for making an attempt to understand what I
was trying to say rather than taking every word at face value. nuance on the
internet is definitely an NP-Hard problem, both transmitting and receiving it
would seem.

~~~
michrassena
I had a mild eureka moment when I read your initial comment. In a way it is
obvious, how could things work otherwise? But linking reality (as a function
of experience) and music is an interesting concept, and one I think has been
explored quite a bit, but I've not seen anything to do with repetition being
the binding concept.

I've recently become more interested in music which is probably why this
resonated with me. A lot of the conventions of music, repetition included, I
consider necessary evils. Like any creative endeavor, there is no correct
music, but I see how it could be fruitful to explore this further.

------
agumonkey
It's more about bending and shifting said repetition IMO.

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Mediterraneo10
How then do we explain some listeners’ aesthetic responses to pure noise, e.g.
Merzbow or other artists from the Japanese or Detroit noise scenes?

~~~
nxpnsv
Is this a grand unified theory of beauty, or an attempt to explain how
melodies work with your brains pattern recognition? I think the latter, so
surely there are other mechanisms of generating aesthetic responses. I
certainly enjoy both Bach fugues and industrial noise experiments, although in
quite different ways.

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symplee
Similar to "The Lick" in improvisational jazz. Seven or Eight specific notes,
heard in so many different songs and genres:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krDxhnaKD7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krDxhnaKD7Q)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lick)

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mturmon
Seems reminiscent of the work of Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, sympathetically
reviewed here ([http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2014/repetition-defines-
music/](http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2014/repetition-defines-music/)) — I
believe her work has been on HN before, but a quick search does not turn it
up.

------
tartoran
Another good example of repetition that gets pleasantly hypnotic

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-RFunvF0mDw)

~~~
combatentropy
The original song is pleasant, "Lady in Red," by Chris de Burgh,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HMDUtirtJM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HMDUtirtJM)

------
blondin
idk. it sounded chaotic and the underlying rhythm made it listenable.

~~~
silentsea90
Or you could rephrase to say - it sounded like jazz.

------
dnprock
Prime numbers are important in music. They're actually random. Repetition of
this randomness makes music beautiful.

~~~
sporkologist
2 and 3 are, but that's about where it ends. Yeah you can do subdivisions of 5
and 7 but it starts to be an academic exercise at that point. So, no, prime
numbers don't have any special relationship to music, sorry. Factors of 12 and
16 are actually the most common and useful groupings in most music that people
can dance to.

~~~
lioeters
On this last point, I recall reading an in-depth article (whose title I've
forgotten..) about the importance of highly divisible numbers in music.

12 has a wonderful property of being variously composable by 2, 3, 4, 6 - and
one reason why it's so commonly used in music is that it's _not_ a prime
number.

