Another example is music. Music needs to have a repetitive pattern, but it shouldn't be too repetitive or it's boring.
The best combination is to establish some patterns by repetition, then break these patterns and introduce new ones to keep the listener guessing, but the deviations should form a bigger pattern as well. It's the best when you can notice the pattern quickly, then before it gets boring it changes, and the new pattern feels like you could have predicted it - but you didn't.
The concept of tension and resolution is fundamental in music, and I think this is very closely related to expectation and surprise - and thus to repetition and pattern-breaking.
From Arnold Schoenberg's Fundamentals of Music Composition:
> "Intelligibility in music seems to be impossible without repetition. While repetition without variation can easily produce monotony, juxtaposition of distantly related elements can easily degenerate into nonsense... Only so much variation as character, length, and tempo required should be admitted."
I'm not completely sure how this squares with the fact that I can listen to a song that I like dozens of times and still enjoy it, but I definitely understand it from the point of view of constructing an interesting work in the first place.
> I'm not completely sure how this squares with the fact that I can listen to a song that I like dozens of times and still enjoy it
Well, it raises the question of: does listening to a non-repetitive song, repeatedly, make it repetitive? Is there a certain gap of time that, even if something repeats, that it no longer feels repetitive?
I think the part of our brains that enjoys music only has short-term memory and is experiencing the pattern-breaking surprise every time, even if you remember the song consciously.
I'd say it's even over time trained to recognize the patters it encounters quicker, so the songs become MORE enjoyable the more you listen to them (up to a point).
Most pop/rock music follows a sort of “rule of two”- introduce a new element which catches the ear, then repeat it, then introduce another element, repeat it, etc. can be as small as a single instrument part (flute sound in the background) or as large as a song section. Rarely does something happen only once, or get repeated many times without modification.
Indeed. Bass lines can be interesting in this regard - they are often repetitive by definition. One song and bass line I find captivating is “All Things” [1] by Hieroglyphics; the bass line anchors the whole song and repeats for the entirety! It works, in my opinion, though seems to be incredibly rare for any part to loop for an entire track.
The song “truck bed” [2] by Hardy has a similar longterm loop on the guitar part but it doesn’t last the entirety, it builds up to a release at the end.
Former radio dj so just think about these kinds of things a lot when listening to music.
Kids like repetition of a certain kind. And people like monotonous activities and I guess "zoning out" too.
However, I can tell you why we get bored easily when seeing repetition. It's that "we've grasped the pattern, it's very simple, and now we have more important things to do with our lives." Predicting the pattern isn't interesting anymore to anyone except maybe a kid for about 10 seconds.
As humans, our curiosity drives us to seek out new things so we can explain our surroundings. Randomness drives us crazy because we can't predict what happens, and thus our ability to "prevent bad things" is hampered. Even worse than randomness is a smart opponent, e.g. in chess, who thwarts our schemes by intelligently choosing a move based on preventing the traps we could lay. We may feel powerless at that point. But even more annoying, to the point of ANGER (a reaction that we and other primates resort to), is when the opponent makes sub-obtimal moves because they can predict what we are going to do, or quickly reacts to what we are doing, and therefore don't even bother defending against things it is confident we won't do. This is worse than us being able to predict things, it's worse than randomness, it's worse than optimal strategy, it's literally them "toying with us" and "cheating by predicting our very moves"!
The reason we feel anger and tend to escalate (e.g. quit the game, flip the board) at that point, is that we sense not only how much weaker we are but that the other side is "making fun of us", toying with us, we have no hope of "winning" but also we are in a dangerous situation since the toying can turn into something more.
> we never find monotonously repeating forms in traditional cultures.
Illustrated on the left by the Parthenon, with a row of eight identical pillars. This has a golden spiral overlaid to show that it's mathsy and natural. Halfway down the article there's a section "levels of scale" which asserts that the spacing of columns on temples is somehow magical and makes them alright, while modern columns are spaced differently and are all wrong.
But no, it's just a monotonous row of pillars. If it had no ancient history it would look kind of oppressive (the same way any charming old castle was originally a military installation built to exert control and spew out steel-clad troopers).
Meaning matters more than neurology, usually. We like stuff we've been made to feel attached to, culturally. But the article also mentions honeycombs. If we are going to talk about neurology, honeycombs will make some people (with trypophobia) very uncomfortable indeed, and the magical minor imperfections and irregularities of nature won't counteract that at all.
Perhaps he shouldn't have used the word 'never' (never say never again), but you've unfairly represented the article. The Parthenon-and-golden-ratio image is not used as a reference; it is related reading. And if you visit that article, you see it's about how the Parthenon is NOT designed after the Golden Ratio!
The main article's point about nested levels of repetition is interesting, and it introduced me to Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order books.
> if you visit that article, you see it's about how the Parthenon is NOT designed after the Golden Ratio!
Oh, so it is! That's refreshing. I didn't expect the link to lead to an article at all, I expected to be invited to buy the book on Amazon.
I don't know, though. He comprehensively demolishes myths about the golden ratio except when promoting his own one. Those rectangular proportions won't lead to good architecture, but "The Golden Mean does apply to architectural composition in the context of scaling hierarchy that organizes complexity" because "Design is linked mathematically with natural growth through hierarchical subdivisions at distinct scales, which is found in a majority of natural structures." Ignore their woo-woo, try mine!
I played through Universal Paperclips 100 times in a row, but I was always seeking to optimize it. I agree that doing things exactly the same way gets old quickly.
There is something satisfying to my mild adhd brain about doing monotonous tasks. I used to work in a candle factory, and one of my tasks was cutting birthday candles to size and packaging them. In on 8 hour period i would package ~8000 candles into ~70 shipping boxes. Start the day with a pile of empty boxes and end the day with a pile of full boxes.
There is something very zen about the point at which you don’t even have to use your eyes anymore because the motions were so second-nature. Other people found it eye-wateringly boring but I thought it was peaceful.
Incrementals tend to rely on a drip-feed of new mechanics and capabilities at the introductory phase, extensive automation in the middle phase, and marathon-like competition against other high-ranked players in the elite phase.
I don't think it's a particularly good counter-example.
The best combination is to establish some patterns by repetition, then break these patterns and introduce new ones to keep the listener guessing, but the deviations should form a bigger pattern as well. It's the best when you can notice the pattern quickly, then before it gets boring it changes, and the new pattern feels like you could have predicted it - but you didn't.
The concept of tension and resolution is fundamental in music, and I think this is very closely related to expectation and surprise - and thus to repetition and pattern-breaking.
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