AKA Your Brain on Music
First, some sound tech:
Surround sound from lightweight roll-to-roll printed loudspeaker paper
Jan 2021, phys.org
Sonorous paper loudspeakers: "Ordinary paper or foils are printed with two layers of a conductive organic polymer as electrodes. A piezoelectric layer is sandwiched between them as the active element, which causes the paper or film to vibrate. Loud and clear sound is produced by air displacement.
via Chemnitz University of Technology: Georg C. Schmidt et al. Paper‐Embedded Roll‐to‐Roll Mass Printed Piezoelectric Transducers, Advanced Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202006437
Next, some music science:
Hit songs rely on increasing “harmonic surprise” to hook listeners, study finds
Aug 2021, Ars Technica
The end result is what the authors call "Inflationary-Surprise Hypothesis," which makes music (and all art, and all culture we would assume) to have more surprise over time. And so if you're kind of old, and you think the music of today sucks, and it's annoying, stupid, and makes no sense, then you're probably right.
In other words, when a song "constantly defies the listener's expectations throughout", that's what you want to hear. Or, from the paper itself, you could say "human perception of tonality is influenced by exposure."
We heard this a long time ago when Leonard Meyer said it --
"A culture, like a musical style, is a learned probability system.” (p17, footnote 21)-Music, the Arts and Ideas. Leonard B. Meyer, U. of Chicago, 1967
Or take a look at this infographic, titled The Anatomy of a Joke.
What to Expect When the Unexpected Becomes Expected: Harmonic Surprise and Preference Over Time in Popular Music. Front. Hum. Neurosci., 30 April 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.578644
And more of the same:
The brain's 'prediction machine' anticipates the future when listening to music
Aug 2021, phys.org
When a musical phrase has an unresolved or uncertain quality about it our brains automatically predict how the melody will end. ... Like a sentence, a musical phrase is a coherent and complete part of a larger whole, but it may end with some uncertainty about what comes next in the melody. The new research shows that listeners use these moments of uncertainty, or high entropy, to determine where one phrase ends and another begins. ... The participants judged melodies that ended on high-entropy tones to be more complete—and lingered on them longer."This study shows that humans harness the statistical properties of the world around them not only to predict what is likely to happen next, but also to parse streams of complex, continuous input into smaller, more manageable segments of information," said Hansen.via Association for Psychological Science: Niels Chr. Hansen et al, Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception, Psychological Science (2021). DOI: 10.1177/0956797621997349
For your listening pleasure:
Music Circles: An interactive data visualization tool that helps users discover new music
Mar 2021, phys.org
It's an advanced music recommendation system. Try it out, called Music Circles:
via Seoul National University: Music-Circles: can music be represented with numbers? arXiv: 2102.13350 [cs.HC]. arxiv.org/abs/2102.13350
Post Script:
Taylor Swift releases a 'perfect replica' of Fearless
Apr 2021, BBC News
Up to now, I thought Taylor Swift was a good musician but more importantly a good young female role model because she handles her celebrity status so well. Now she's in the pantheon of powerful and middle-finger-wielding artists because she straight re-mastered her master copies to fuck her record owners and take back control of her own work.
If you're not sure why this is such a big deal, see David Byrne's How Music Works (2012) for a good intro to the world of musicians, their music and their rights.
When you make a song, and then someone uses that song in the opening scene of their superfamous blockbuster movie, somebody gets paid, but it might not be you. It depends who owns the "master copy" of that song. Even if you play your own song live, and record that, and use that in a commercial or movie, it's still the "original" master copy that gets the credit, and the money. Somebody recorded that song in a music studio and made a physical copy of the recording. The music is ephemeral and nobody can own that. The idea for the song even moreso. But that recording, on that day, in that studio, is a physical thing, and it represents all the ephemera that come after, so whoever owns the master, owns it all.
Swift's re-mastering makes the old master copies worthless, and puts her in full control of her own work, something that rarely happens to an artist as big as her.
