The Gist:
Music that appears complex but that actually is comprised of simple
patterns, such as Beethoven, is more enjoyable than modern pop music or
avant-garde chaotic music.
When
comparing an encyclopaedia to a random sequence of letters of the same
length, from our perspective as human consumers the encyclopaedia
contains more 'useful information.' Yet from an Information Theory
perspective it actually contains less total information because
regularities and patterns in the data make it more compressible.
I've
set myself the realistic goal of trying to understanding the psychology
underlying "successful" music. The information that already exist that
needs sorting though is intimidating but my mind is full of cliches
like, "the journey of 1,000 miles begin with one step." My beginning
steps are my looking through popular music articles that reference
scientific studies, reading said studies, and trying to understand them
myself. So far the journey has been illuminating and disappointing.
There is a lot of fucking fluff out there. I genuinely hope to not be
one of those content mills.
The study I read for this article was found on livescience.com. Read the article. Give them some traffic.
From
the way the article is written, it seems that Biologist Nicholas Hudson
performed experiments where he used audio compression software to test a
hypothesis; that seemingly complex music which is highly "losslessly"
compressible is more enjoyable than music that is less compressible.
Before we dive into what all that means, I want to point out that Hudson
performed no experiment. The study referred to in the livescience
article is a paper Hudson wrote in which he proposed experiments that
should be conducted. He did not conduct any experiments.
"This hypothesis, if supported by the recommended experiments, will shed new light on the open question as to the biological origin of music."
If you want the full description, read Hudson's paper. I'll sum it up.
- Humans have an innate reward system for simple answers that explain complex phenomena. (mathematical proofs, physical laws, information theory.)
- Audio compression is an objective way to determine the unapparent patterns which underlie seemingly complex songs.
- We will enjoy complex songs that are more compressible.
- Beethoven's 3rd is more compressible than modern pop songs.
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