Showing posts with label entropy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label entropy. Show all posts

Thursday, June 11, 2026

On the Tip of the Telepathic Tongue


Distinguishing 'things' from 'stuff': Brain's visual processing areas separate solid objects from flowing substances
Jul 2025, phys.org

Things - rigid or deformable objects like a bouncing ball
Stuff - liquids or granular substances such as sand

"When you're looking at some fluid or gooey stuff, you engage with it in different way than you do with a rigid object. With a rigid object, you might pick it up or grasp it, whereas with fluid or gooey stuff, you probably are going to have to use a tool to deal with it" 

via MIT: Dissociable Cortical Regions Represent Things and Stuff in the Human Brain, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.07.027. 



Language structure shapes color-adjective links even for people born blind, study reveals
Apr 2025, phys.org

"Certain colors are strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g., red is hot, blue is cold)" 

"Some of these associations are grounded in visual experiences such as seeing glowing red embers. Surprisingly, despite having no visual experience, many congenitally blind people show very similar color associations, which are likely learned through language. We show that these associations are indeed embedded in the statistical structure of language."

via University of Wisconsin-Madison: Qiawen Liu et al, Learning about color from language, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00230-9.


A universal rhythm guides how we speak: Global analysis reveals 1.6-second 'intonation units'
Aug 2025, phys.org

Human speech across the world pulses to the beat of what are called intonation units, short prosodic phrases that occur at a consistent rate of one every 1.6 seconds.

Intonation units play a critical role in helping listeners follow conversations, take turns speaking, and absorb information. 

The research analyzed over 650 recordings in 48 languages spanning every continent and 27 language families.

via Hebrew University: Maya Inbar et al, A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2425166122


What's in a name? Information structure parallels discovered across cultures—with repercussions for Asian names
Feb 2026, phys.org

(ie, Name Entropy)

Fixing of Western last names around the 1600's meant a loss of information within the naming system, which had to be compensated for - which is why first names now convey more and more information (there's more first names than there used to be).

Naming systems must allow for the separate identification of a large number of people, while keeping the total number of words required by the system manageable so that they don't overtax people's brains as they process them.

In England, in every 50-year period between 1550 and 1880, half of the male population was given the first names John, William, or Thomas, and half the female population Ann, Mary, or Elizabeth.

Today, in Korea, it's the opposite, in both ways, because half the population still has 6 names, and in Asia, they come first, not last - Kim Jong Il would be called Jong Il Kim in the West. And I can't find it in the paper but I think the 6 names would be something like Kim, Park, Lee, Son, ...

From the paper itself, using badminton player Simon Archer and the basketball player Yao Ming 姚明 - Simon and Yao are names, whereas Archer is an English word for someone who shoots arrows with a bow, and Ming is a Chinese word meaning brightness.

The problem is that, because of the focus on inherited names in the Western system, the order of names of researchers from East Asian countries is reversed for publication. For Asian researchers, this means that the part of the name that conveys more information is initialized, and the part that conveys less is written out in full.

"For researchers from China today, it is as if Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, and Charles Dodgson had all been forced to publish their works under the name Charles D."

via University of Tübingen, MIT, UC Irvine, U of Texas at Austin: Michael Ramscar et al, Cross-cultural structures of personal name systems reflect general communicative principles, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-67079-8


Study suggests people are losing 338 spoken words every year and have been for at least 15 years
Apr 2026, phys.org

(Surprise) We were replicating an earlier paper on gender differences in how many words men and women speak per day. My collaborator, Valeria Pfeifer, came to me with the word counts from the replication analyses using the same methodology as our 2007 paper, but with 2,200 new participants across 22 studies. Our estimate of daily spoken word average came in at around 12,700 words. Our 2007 estimate had been 15,900. I told her there had to be a mistake. But she rechecked everything, and the number held. Something had genuinely changed.

These studies were conducted for entirely different purposes—coping with breast cancer, adjustment after divorce, the social effects of meditation, relationship dynamics. None of them were designed to track how much people talk over time. Participants had no idea their word counts would ever be analyzed this way, which rules out any concern that people adjusted their behavior to fit a hypothesis.

Young adults under 25 showed a steeper decline, about 452 words per year, compared to 314 for older adults.

via University of Arizona and University of Missouri–Kansas City: Valeria A. Pfeifer et al, Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2026). DOI: 10.1177/17456916261425131


Small talk shapes big trends: Physics predicts how language patterns spread
May 2026, phys.org

The model is a step towards understanding the "statistical physics of language" - Professor Burridge tested his approach against large-scale survey data on American dialects collected by the Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes, created by Bert Vaux, a professor of linguistics at the University of Cambridge. 

In 1950, the term roly-poly for a woodlouse was largely confined to a relatively small group of speakers in the American South. By 1995, the term had spread dramatically, becoming almost universal across much of the United States.

"Splinter is used across almost all of England, except around Newcastle, where people still say spelk. Although Newcastle itself is densely populated, it is surrounded by more sparsely populated areas, which helps the local form hold its ground and prevents splinters from taking over.

University of Portsmouth: James Burridge, Statistical field theory for dialectology, Physical Review E (2026). DOI: 10.1103/7f86-mxf2.
On arXiv: DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2512.17668

Post Script: I was thinking about the word zig-zag, and whether or not I actually made up the word wiggle-waggle or if I heard it somewhere. And after that I was thinking why have one and the other but not ziggle zaggle or wig-wag. 

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Tuesday, April 8, 2025

On Making Music for Entropy's Sake


The above image comes from research by the music writer Ted Gioia, and is described in more detail below. 

As for the first article we see here, this question starts us off - are these scientists measuring the "natural" changing preference in our culture for less complex music, or are they simply measuring market forces? (A crippled market of course, which has no more growth potential, and which is cannibalizing itself, as described below.)

Using network science, study shows music has become less complex
Jan 2025, phys.org

Measuring the complexity of a piece of music - They began by thinking of each note as a node on a network and then connecting them using edges if they came directly one after another, then thickening the edges based on the number of times a single note transitioned to another. The more complex the series of notes, the more complex the music.

20,000 songs later, they found that classical music was more complex than modern music, with the exception of jazz.

The researchers also found that music of all kinds has slowly become simpler as time has passed, even classical and jazz. They were not able to explain why but suggested that technical advancements allowing more people to participate in composing songs may play a role. [I wonder how they cancel industry effects like consolidation of companies and risk avoidance, a la Ted Gioia)

 

via Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Padova: Niccolo' Di Marco et al, Decoding Musical Evolution Through Network Science, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2501.07557


Contrasting the above research, which comes from culturally hermetic academia, with the research below, which comes from a music writer who's also a musician and a bit more nuance in how the actual world of music works:

The Music Business is Healthy Again? Really?
Feb 2025, Ted Gioia

Instead of focusing on exciting new music, Spotify prefers to serve up AI slop (acquired on the cheap), fake artists, and lots of old songs.

This is a stark contrast to video streaming—where Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Disney, and others invest tens of billions of dollars annually in creating new films and series.

Music streamers don’t like creating content (that word, ugh!). Other people need to make those risky investments—not the streaming platform.


And he goes on to show announcements that both Warner Music and Universal have signed recently new deals with Spotify, without disclosing any financial details. His solution?

"Instead of bowing and scraping, they should cut off Spotify and launch their own streaming platform—run as a cooperative of labels and artists."

And lastly, he says even Spotify execs are selling their shares.


'Work flow' music designed to improve performance does just that
Feb 2025, phys.org

I hear "functional fragrance" but for music:

196 adult volunteers listened to various types of music and office background noise while conducting work tasks. The only type of music that helped performance was work flow, and it improved reaction time and mood. 

"Their work also shows that the people behind the creation of work flow music have done their homework in identifying the sounds and arrangements that can take attentional focus away from the music toward the task at hand. Such music, they note, tends to have a strong rhythm, simple tonality, moderate dynamism and broad spectral energy."

"The people" they're talking about are probably AI programs bought by a streaming company. At least that's my suspicion, so I looked. 

The first was “work flow” music sampled from a synonymous playlist on a music therapy app (spiritune.com). On spiritune's website, I read "Our scientific advisors and composers work together to deliver compositions optimized and adapted around those musical characteristics to help create tracks that work harder for your health." And when I hear "scientific advisor" I think "IP Thief Chief".

The second type was “deep focus” music, sampled from a synonymous playlist on a music streaming platform, and that would be Spotify. 

(Note: Neither work flow nor deep focus music had lyrics; and two additional audio conditions used were the “Hot 100” playlist published by an American music magazine, and “calm office noise”sampled from a synonymous sound generator on a website offering noise stimulation.)

via Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University Medical Center, Stanford School of Medicine and Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Department of Psychology and Music and Audio Research Laboratory at NYU: Joan Orpella et al, Effects of music advertised to support focus on mood and processing speed, PLOS ONE (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0316047

Post Script: "participants were recruited online using Amazon Mechanical Turk"; always good to remember who butters the bread.  

Further Reading: Muzak is Back

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Sunday, March 30, 2025

On Language the Universal Autoencoder

 
  
The 'Arrow of Time' effect: LLMs are better at predicting what comes next than what came before
Sep 2024, phys.org

Their performance at predicting the previous word is always a few percent worse than at predicting the next word. This phenomenon is universal across languages, and can be observed with any large language model."

"In theory, there should be no difference between the forward and backward directions, but LLMs appear to be somehow sensitive to the time direction in which they process text. Interestingly, this is related to a deep property of the structure of language that could only be discovered with the emergence of large language models in the last five years."

via EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne: Vassilis Papadopoulos et al, Arrows of Time for Large Language Models, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.17505



Ouch! Study investigates pain vocalizations and interjections across 131 languages
Nov 2024, phys.org

Each of the three emotions yielded consistent and distinct vowel signatures across cultures. Pain interjections also featured similar open vowels, such as "a," and wide falling diphthongs, such as "ai" in "Ayyy!" and "aw" in "Ouch!"

However, for disgusted and joyful emotions, in contrast to vocalizations, the interjections lacked regularities across cultures. The researchers expressed surprise at this latter finding.

Is this because disgust is cultural, or at least not entirely physical, and heavily mediated by culture, as compared to actual pain? This is commonly understood in the realm of olfactory perception, where some people think the smell of revolting, rotten fish is delicious (they're Norwegian). Or the smell of vomit (they're Italian, Parmesan to be specific), or the smell of the inside of the skin folds of a homeless person who hasn't been able to bathe in months (they're called New Yorkers, and they kind of long for the smell of the subway, which contains these volatiles). In fact, anything that's fermented is so close to rotten food, that unless you've been culturally conditioned to like it, you won't, at least not at first. Cilantro, I'm looking at you too. 

via CNRS et Université Lumière Lyon, School of Social Sciences at University of Western Australia, and Institute of Psychology at University of Wrocław: Vowel signatures in emotional interjections and nonlinguistic vocalizations expressing pain, disgust and joy across languages, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2024). DOI: 10.1121/10.0032454


Words activate hidden brain processes shaping emotions, decisions and behavior
Jan 2025, phys.org

Words have meaning, but they also have emotional meaning:

"There's no single brain region handling this activity, and it's not as simple as one chemical representing one emotion."

(These studies were done thanks to the participation of patients being treated for epilepsy.)

The researchers discovered emotionally charged words - whether positive, negative, or neutral - modulate neurotransmitter release. By measuring the sub-second dynamics of the releases, they identified distinct patterns tied to emotional tone, anatomical regions, and which hemisphere of the brain was involved.

"The surprising result came from the thalamus. This region hasn't been thought to have a role in processing language or emotional content, yet we saw neurotransmitter changes in response to emotional words. This suggests that even brain regions not typically associated with emotional or linguistic processing might still be privy to that information. For instance, parts of the brain responsible for mobilizing movement might benefit from having access to emotionally significant information to guide behavior."

Note: The words used in the study were drawn from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database, which rates words by positive, negative, or neutral emotional valence.

via Virginia Tech School of Neuroscience and Fralin Biomedical Research Institute: Seth R. Batten et al, Emotional words evoke region- and valence-specific patterns of concurrent neuromodulator release in human thalamus and cortex, Cell Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.115162

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Friday, February 28, 2025

Muzak Is Back


Seven years ago I started buying muzak. That's right you heard me, it's on my playlist. And that's right, you too can buy muzak. I learned a long time ago to stop questioning my own behavior and just let it happen - it all makes sense if you wait long enough.

It all started while watching a Japanese television show about the cultural practices around sleep in Japan. (If you fall asleep in class as a college student, it's not seen as disrespectful, because just being in the same room shows you care.) The background music caught my ear, and I looked further into the description for the video, and found the source (go figure, what a crazy idea). 

Then I said to myself - can I buy this? Is muzak only for sale to Japanese television show producers and discount furniture store managers? Yes! No! You can totally buy muzak. In fact, it's easier than buying regular music these days (probably because nobody buys music these days). I found the track I was looking for, even looked up the artists involved and bought a couple more. I left the experience thinking how strange it is to be a human, urges and decisions come from seemingly nowhere, make you do things, but at the same time there's a man behind the curtain, watching the one who does things, bewildered. What is wrong with me? Who on earth is buying muzak, on purpose, like to listen to on purpose? 

Years later, two weeks ago, I sit in a cafe listening to laid back acoustic covers of pop music from the 60's - 90's coming from their streaming platform's playlist. After one too many of these cover songs, I get a chill down my spine - something weird about this, the entropy-measuring machine in my head is confused. I approach the business owner and ask where these songs are coming from. He tells me Spotify, but I already know that. I ask again, are these songs AI? All of them are AI, aren't they? I saw the flash in his eyes. Prompt engineering has been a thing for a while now; people are familiar with it. So this business owner imagines out loud, "young asian with thick rimmed glasses acoustic guitar for low-key cafe background music", like that? Just like that, I said. And he looked at the device controlling the music, and he scrolled through the artists, and he looked at the prompt he originally input. He scrolled down, then back up, then back down again, his eyes feverish and darting. 

The following week, I'm eating lunch in a grand banquet hall for a work conference in Atlantic City, laid back music softly playing in the background. But then it happens - it's Black Sabbath's Ironman, as a bossa nova cover. Now I am no music expert, maybe an aficionado, but by no means a music trivia master. But I will tell you this - if you've ever heard a bossa nova cover of Ironman, you would fucking know. (The Cardigans is as close as you'll get by the way). That's it. I put down my fork, and with a mouthful of food I walk across the banquet hall of 1,000 people and up to the DJ. He's behind a table, manning his decks and his sound equipment, minding his own business. I start off politely, but then I can't hold back - what the hell is this? There's no way this is real. He's confused. I say look at the playlist, you recognize any of these artists? He says who the hell are you. I say look at the playlist. He does. He's still confused. He looks back at me and asks again who I am. But that's not important, I'm not important. What's important is that he - who apparently owns the audio-visual company serving this conference, had no idea this was happening. He just types "bossa nova brunch hour", pushes the button and sits down for the afternoon. I don't blame him, to be clear, although I'm a bit more upset about the guy running an A-V company than the one running a cafe.  

Maybe you run a business. Maybe you like to have music in the background for your customers. Not like the kind of music that makes you wanna cry, or fight, or dance or sing. The kind of music that makes you more relaxed, maybe more focused, but that you don't really notice. Some might call this functional music, but I haven't heard the term used, I'm just making this up. 

Then I realized there's already a word for this; it's called muzak. Start paying attention and you'll hear it too. You can tell because entropy. (See below for links to older posts about how entropy works in music, and information in general.) Entropy is an important concept in the world of artificial intelligence, and once you know what to look for, it helps you understand how it works, and how it doesn't.

Let's make this point real quick - Spotify does not pay musicians anymore, because they don't have to. They made a music generator that's been trained on real musicians' music, and plays that music back again, but in a way that's different enough to be considered Fair Use (under copyright law), and despite that fact that they stole the training music in the first place. You load a prompt, Japanese television show background music for example, and sit back and let the computer make music for you in real time. Guess who gets paid - not the original musicians, not the computer making the music in real time. Spotify gets paid; they get paid by advertisers, and by business owners who want ad-free music. And they pay nobody in return. They have effectively removed musicians from the equation. 

And we have effectively moved right past muzak, and into the low-entropy world of cold, unemotional non-music. This essay by music blogger Ted Goiai does a great job explaining what's happened to the music industry over the past years and even decades, as it becomes more and more boring, less and less able to create something new, or to take risks. Everything becomes plain vanilla, everything becomes a potato. No parsnips, no yams, no yucca, no celery root, no daikon, no turnips, no rutabaga. Just potatoes, because they are the most in-between, the most representative, and ultimately the most boring. The way artificial generation works is ultimately ruled by thermodynamics, and so the output can never have more entropy than the input. In other words, the music being produced can never be more interesting than what it's copying.

Should I be making a plea for people to support their muzak-making co-species? Perhaps. Or perhaps muzak was the first vulture to circle this industry. I'd rather make a plea for business owners who want music to play at their place of business to reach out to local radio station DJs who know where to find real, new music. There is new music being made every day by real humans. It's new, it's real, and it's good, but you would never know, because the consolidation of the music industry, and unfortunately every creative industry, makes everything look like everything else until there's only one song left (probably a Beatles song). If you run a business, you don't have time to find these musicians and their music. But local radio station DJs do, and they can help you populate your playlist. 

Two weeks after the epiphany at the cafe, the owner is back to his old playlist, which is about 500 songs by artists you know and love. No covers, no computers, just music. But two weeks after that, he's back to the muzak (auto-generated aka AI music). We can only listen to Nirvana's cover of The Man Who Sold the World so many times, you know? And the novelty has yet to wear of for the auto-generated, author-vacant, soft-cover version of that song where the auto-translated lyrics screw up Kurt Cobain's mumbled words and repeat them like they're totally normal (the way your GPS has funny ways of pronouncing some of the streets in your neighborhood).

Somewhere between the two stands the music industry, like "Confused John Travolta" in Pulp Fiction.


Post Script from the Music Writer Ted Gioia:
"In fact, nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music. Who can blame them? The radio stations will only play songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. That’s even more true for the algorithms curating so much of our new music—the algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That’s actually how the current system has been designed to work." -Is Old Music Killing New Music? Jan 2022 [link]


Further Reading on How Entropy Works in Music, and Information in General:
Entropy Engineering and Social Syncopation, 2025
Your Brain is a Prediction Machine, 2021
Culture as Learned Probability System, 2012
On Free Will and Risk, 2012
Nature Nature Everywhere, 2017

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Friday, January 3, 2025

Entropy Engineering and Social Syncopation


Singing researchers find cross-cultural patterns in music and language
May 2024, phys.org

An international team of researchers recorded themselves performing traditional music and speaking in their native language. In all 50+ languages, the rhythms of songs and instrumental melodies were slower than those of speech, while the pitches were higher and more stable.

Speculating on underlying reasons for the cross-cultural similarities, Savage suggests songs are more predictably regular than speech because they are used to facilitate synchronization and social bonding.

"Slow, regular, predictable melodies make it easier for us to sing together in large groups," he says. "We're trying to shed light on the cultural and biological evolution of two systems that make us human: music and language."

via Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen: Yuto Ozaki et al, Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower, higher, and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adm9797. 



Neuroplasticity study shows how singing rehabilitates speech production in post-stroke aphasia
May 2024, phys.org

According to the findings, singing repairs the structural language network of the brain. The language network processes language and speech in our brain. In patients with aphasia, the network has been damaged.

"For the first time, our findings demonstrate that the rehabilitation of patients with aphasia through singing is based on neuroplasticity changes"

via University of Helsinki: Aleksi J. Sihvonen et al, Structural Neuroplasticity Effects of Singing in Chronic Aphasia, eNeuro (2024). DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0408-23.2024


Study shows the power of social connections to predict hit songs
Jun 2024, phys.org

The team analyzed data from last.fm, analyzing 2.7 million users, 10 million songs, and 300 million plays, along with networks of mapping friendships and another capturing influence dynamics (who listens to a song and who follows suit). 

Examining the first 200 plays of a new song, they predicted its chances of becoming a hit.

The researchers improved the precision of predicting hit songs from 14% to 21%.

Existing models often focus on artist fame and listening metrics, but the CSH study highlights the overlooked social aspect - musical homophily, which is the tendency for friends to listen to similar music.

via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Niklas Reisz et al, Quantifying the impact of homophily and influencer networks on song popularity prediction, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-58969-w


Understanding the synchronization of physiological states during a live music performance
Jul 2024, phys.org

"Music-induced synchronization of heart rate may be the mechanism underlying the coherent behavior of a large audience in a theater." 

Synchronization of physical and cognitive processes is better within an individual compared to that between different individuals; and heart rate synchronization in response to music depends on the reliable physiological responses of the listener, not on their mood or music preferences.

Note that in the study, to guage mood, they had participants in the study listen to the same piece of music on different days. And to quantify the influence of music preference on heart rate synchronization, he investigated whether a person listening to a piece of music selected by the researcher differed in synchronization response to a piece of music that deeply moves them when played in a randomized order.

Why - "From data on small audiences, for example, the degree of proficiency of performers, commercial success can be predicted in terms of reliability."

via Waseda University: Ryota Nomura, Reliability for music-induced heart rate synchronization, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-62994-0


Classical music lifts our mood by synchronizing our 'extended amygdala'
Aug 2024, phys.org

The study focused on 13 patients with treatment-resistant depression who already had electrodes implanted in their brains for the purpose of deep-brain stimulation. These implants are placed in a circuit connecting two areas in the forebrain—the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Using these implants, the researchers found that music generates its antidepressant effects by synchronizing the neural oscillations between the auditory cortex, which is responsible for processing of sensory information, and the rewards circuit, which is responsible for processing emotional information.

The patients in the study were assigned to two groups: low music appreciation or high music appreciation. Those in the high music appreciation group demonstrated more significant neural synchronization and better antidepressant effects, while those in the low music appreciation group showed poorer results.  

via Center for Functional Neurosurgery at Shanghai Jiao Tong University: uditory entrainment coordinates cortical-BNST-NAc triple time locking to alleviate the depressive disorder, Cell Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.114474. 

Intermission on sonic superpowers:
Singing from memory unlocks a surprisingly common musical superpower
Aug 2024, phys.org

They asked people to sing out any earworms they were experiencing and record them on their phones when prompted at random times throughout the day, and found the majority perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs.

"Surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden 'perfect pitch' ability."

They think it depends on whether the music was recalled deliberately or as a result of an "earworm", which is why they asked people to record themselves as soon as they hear one in their head. So now they think there may be something unique about musical memories and the ways they are encoded and maintained inside our brains.

via University of California Santa Cruz: Matthew G. Evans et al, Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (2024). DOI: 10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0


Below are a couple articles recalling the genius of Leonard B. Meyer

Bach, Mozart or jazz: Scientists provide a quantitative measure of variability in music pieces
Nov 2024, phys.org

They even mention Meyer in the write up: "According to Meyer, emotions and meaning in music arise from the interplay of expectations and their fulfillment or (temporary) non-fulfillment."

Sorry I have to copy mostly the whole thing, because this stuff is complicated:

They used time series analysis to infer how similar a tone sequence is to previous sequences (the autocorrelation function of musical pitch sequences).

They analyzed more than 450 jazz improvisations and 99 classical compositions, and found the autocorrelation function of pitches initially decreases slowly with the time difference. This expresses a high similarity and possibility to anticipate musical sequences. 

However, they found that there is a time limit, after which this similarity and predictability ends relatively abruptly. For larger time differences, the autocorrelation function and memory are both negligible.

Of particular interest here are the values of the transition times of the pieces where the more predictable behavior changes into a completely unpredictable and uncorrelated behavior. Depending on the composition or improvisation, the scientists found transition times ranging from a few quarter notes to about 100 quarter notes. Jazz improvisations typically had shorter transition times than many classical compositions, and therefore were usually less predictable.

Differences could also be observed between different composers. For example, the researchers found transition times between five and twelve quarter notes in various compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, while the transition times in various compositions by Mozart ranged from eight to 22 quarter notes. This implies that the anticipation and expectation of the musical progression tends to last longer in Mozart's compositions than in Bach's compositions, which offer more variability and surprises.

via Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the University of Göttingen: Corentin Nelias et al, Stochastic properties of musical time series, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-53155-y


Study explores how brain waves reflect melody predictions while listening to music
Nov 2024, phys.org

We aimed to disentangle the frequency-specific neural dynamics linked to melodic prediction uncertainty (modeled as entropy) and prediction error (modeled as surprisal) for temporal (note onset) and content (note pitch) information."

They recruited 20 participants, half of whom were professional pianists, to listen to 10 piano melodies extracted from the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, each lasting approximately 150 seconds, and while being recorded using electroencephalography (EEG).

"An analysis of the temporal response function (TRF) weights revealed that the temporal predictability of a note (entropy of note onset) may be encoded in the delta- (1–4 Hz) and beta-band (12–30 Hz) brain activity prior to the stimulus, suggesting that these frequency bands associate with temporal predictions."

via Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences: Juan-Daniel Galeano-Otálvaro et al, Neural encoding of melodic expectations in music across EEG frequency bands. European Journal of Neuroscience(2024). DOI: 10.1111/ejn.16581

Further Reading for Meyer-like things:

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Monday, August 19, 2024

Music is the Math of Feelings


Whether you're a scientist or a musician, there's something semi-sacrilegious about studying the science of music. Music is spiritual, it's secretive, it's a folk art encompassing amateurs and experts alike. It's not supposed to be a bunch of cold hard math or esoteric entropic distribution matrices, that kind of takes the fun out of it. On the other hand, it's irresistible to think you could find laws of human behavior hiding in there, even laws of the universe! 

Music found to cause similar emotions and bodily sensations across cultures
Jan 2024, phys.org

  • Happy and danceable music was felt in the arms and legs
  • Tender and sad music was felt in the chest
  • Music with a clear beat was found happy and danceable
  • Dissonance in music was associated with aggressiveness

via University of Turku and University of Aalto in Finland and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China: Vesa Putkinen et al, Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2308859121

Mostly unrelated image credit: AI Art - Graffiti Typography - 2024 And is that f*cking "pinterest watermark"??


Live music emotionally moves us more than streamed music, show researchers
Feb 2024, phys.org

  • Live performances trigger a stronger emotional response than listening to music from a device.
  • Concerts connect performers with their audience, which may also have to do with evolutionary factors.
  • A pianist changed the live music he or she was playing to intensify the emotional reactions in the amygdala.
  • Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the activity in the amygdala of 27 listeners as well as the performer in real time.
  • Based on these measurements, the pianist then immediately adapted his performance to intensify the audience's emotions further.
  • Listeners were played a recording of the same music performed by the same musician but without the neurofeedback loop.
  • Pleasant and unpleasant emotions performed as live music elicited much higher and more consistent activity in the amygdala than recorded music. 
  • The live performance also stimulated a more active exchange of information in the whole brain, which points to strong emotional processing in the affective and cognitive parts of the brain.
  • A strong synchronization between subjective emotional experience and the auditory brain system was only observed when the audience was listening to the live performance.
  • Only live music showed a strong and positive coupling between features of the musical performance and brain activity.

via University of Zurich: Trost, Wiebke et al, Live music stimulates the affective brain and emotionally entrains listeners in real time, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2316306121.


Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive since 1980, study finds
Mar 2024, phys.org

They analyzed the lyrics of 12,000 English-language rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock songs (2,400 songs per genre) released between 1980 and 2020, with additional analyses of 12,000 song lyrics on the online song lyric platform Genius:

  • Lyrics have become simpler and easier to understand over time
  • The number of different words used within songs has decreased
  • The number of words with three or more syllables has increased in rap songs since 1980
  • General increases in the repetitiveness of lyrics may have led to lyrics becoming simpler overall
  • Lyrics have tended to become more emotional and personal over time
  • Both emotionally positive and negative words increased in rap songs
  • Emotionally negative lyrics increased for R&B, pop and country songs
  • All genres showed an increase in the use of anger-related words
  • The lyrics of older rock songs tend to be viewed more than those of newer rock songs
  • The lyrics of newer country songs tend to be viewed more than those of older country songs

via Department of Music Pedagogy at Nuremberg University of Music, Department of Computer Science at University of Innsbruck, Human-centered AI Group at Linz Institute of Technology, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence: Eva Zangerle, Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-55742-x.


Why some types of music make people want to dance more than others
Mar 2024, phys.org

They discovered what they believe to be the mechanism in the brain that controls the desire to dance when prompted by music.

60 adult volunteers listened to 12 melodies with different degrees of syncopation and rated each based on their desire to get up and dance.

They found that melodies with a medium degree of syncopation caused the strongest desire to dance.

29 adults wore magnetoencephalography helmets while they listened to different kinds of music. 

The researchers found that the auditory cortex primarily focused on rhythm, while the dorsal auditory pathway appeared to match the rhythm to the beat.

This, the researchers suggest, indicates that the music-prompted desire to dance likely happens within that pathway, from which it is then passed on to motor areas that act on the impulse.

Final thought - The researchers suggest their work cumulatively shows that the sudden desire to dance prompted by music with a medium amount of syncopation is the brain's attempt to anticipate beats among the syncopation — it causes the body to literally lean forward repeatedly. (You mean like Rain Man?)

via Aix Marseille Université in France and the University of Connecticut: Arnaud Zalta et al, Neural dynamics of predictive timing and motor engagement in music listening, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi2525


Body mapping links responses to music with degree of uncertainty and surprise
Apr 2024, phys.org

Researchers asked 527 participants to map where they felt sensations in their bodies and the emotions they had while listening to 92 unique chord progressions with varying degrees of uncertainty and surprise.

"Prediction and uncertainty affect heart and abdominal sensations"
  • Certain chord progressions sparked sensations in the heart while others were felt more in the stomach
  • Certain chords evoked aesthetic appreciation, leading to a decline in negative emotions of awkwardness and anxiety
  • More predictable chord progressions brought on feelings of calmness, relief, satisfaction, nostalgia, and empathy

I wonder what chord progressions they're looking at, but they created an algorithm for chord progression, and as an untrained musician, it doesn't translate for me, although someone with a better understanding might get it.

Here's the algorithm:

These chord progressions were generated using a statistical-learning model to compute the Shannon information content and entropy, based on transitional probabilities of each chord using a corpus of 890 pop songs from the US Billboard.

Here's two samples of their chord progressions:

(1) sLuL-sLuL sequence (Figure 1A) representing the condition where the 1st–3rd chords have low surprise and uncertainty and the 4th chord has low surprise and uncertainty.

(2) sLuL-sHuL sequence (Figure 1B) representing the condition where the 1st-3rd chords have low surprise and uncertainty and the 4th chord has high surprise and low uncertainty.

(There are 8 progressions in total, with variations on this theme)

On entropy, from the paper itself:

Entropy gauges the perceptual uncertainty a listener feels in predicting an “upcoming” chord based on prior chords, while information content quantifies the surprise experienced upon hearing the actual chord.
^This is the old Anatomy of a Joke formula.

via University of Tokyo: Bodily Maps of Uncertainty and Surprise in Musical Chord Progression and the Underlying Emotional Response, iScience (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109498.


Sad music study tests the direct effect hypothesis of 'pleasurable negative emotion'
Apr 2024, phys.org

Yeah this is weird

Participants were asked to imagine if their sadness could be "removed" when listening to the music - which the majority self-reported they could do.

"We know that many people are quite apt when it comes to thought experiments, so it's a reasonable approach to use and, at worst, it should produce no results"

After the imagined removal of sadness, participants were asked if they liked the piece of music any differently: 82% said that removing the sadness reduced their enjoyment of the music.

"Experiencing a wide range of emotions in a more or less safe environment could help us learn how to deal with what we encounter in the world."

"Previous studies refer to an 'indirect effect hypothesis,' which means that people may experience sadness, but it is something else they enjoy - being moved."

via University of New South Wales: Emery Schubert et al, Liking music with and without sadness: Testing the direct effect hypothesis of pleasurable negative emotion, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299115

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Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Cryptothermodynamics Why Not



Physics-based cryptocurrency transmits energy (not just information) through blockchain
Jun 2022, phys.org

In their new paper, Lawrence Livermore researchers Maxwell Murialdo and Jon Belof have detailed how this connection between energy and information allows for the creation of a cryptocurrency token that is directly backed by and convertible into one kilowatt-hour of electricity. While it requires the input of one kilowatt-hour of electricity to mint an E-Stablecoin token, that digital token can later be destroyed to extract back out one kilowatt-hour of usable electricity. Thus, the price of one E-Stablecoin token is pegged to the price of one kilowatt-hour of electricity in a manner that is robust, stable and trustless (a system that does not depend on an institution or third party for a network or payment system to function).

As Murialdo explained: "Any anonymous party can mint an E-Stablecoin token with the input of roughly one kilowatt-hour of electricity. They can then transact with the digital token like any other cryptocurrency, or even turn it back into usable electricity—all without the need for electrical power companies, electrical transmission lines, permissions or authorities. It is a trustless system from top to bottom."

A feat made possible by using the interplay of thermodynamics and information theory, it may help to distribute electricity to remote locations that are not connected by an electrical grid system, or combat climate change by enabling intermittent, renewable energy to be transmitted to the places where it is needed most for efficiency.

via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Maxwell Murialdo et al, Can a Stablecoin Be Collateralized by a Fully Decentralized, Physical Asset?, Cryptoeconomic Systems (2022). DOI: 10.21428/58320208.adf5637a

Image credits: Pretty sure the entire goal of this weblog is to get me to identify searchwords that do not yet exist. (Screenshot taken August 24 2022)
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Thursday, August 11, 2022

No Privacy - Identity Supremacy


All-seeing, all-knowing identity supremacy.

Data collected from acquaintances and even strangers can predict your location
Apr 2022, phys.org

It's like with a pandemic, no matter how safe you are, you're only as safe as the people around you are safe:

Your Colocation Network
"Almost as much latent information can be extracted from perfect strangers that the individual tends to co-locate with."

Obvious network: people who are socially tied to an individual, such as family members, friends, or co-workers

Not-So-Obvious Network: people who are not socially tied to an individual, but who are at a location at a similar time as the individual. They might include people working in the same building but with different companies, parents whose children attend the same schools but who are unknown to each other, or people who shop at the same grocery store.

 Ahh, always excited to read the word "surprisingly" in the results.

Movement patterns of people who are socially tied to an individual contain up to 95% of the information needed to predict that individual's mobility patterns. However, even more surprisingly, they found that strangers not tied socially to an individual could also provide significant information, predicting up to 85% of an individual's movement.
"This research has a lot of implications for surveillance and privacy issues, especially with the rise of authoritarian impulses. We can't just tell people to switch off their phones or go off the grid. We need to have dialogs to put in place laws and guidelines that regulate how people collecting your data use it." -Gourab Ghoshal, Data Science at the University of Rochester

via University of Rochester, University of Exeter, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Northeastern University, and University of Vermont: Zexun Chen et al, Contrasting social and non-social sources of predictability in human mobility, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29592-y


Europeans' data shared 376 times daily in advertising sales, report says
May 2022, BBC News
  • Europeans' data shared 376 times daily in advertising sales.
  • The figure rises to 747 times daily for US-based users.
  • The revenue from digital adverts is what keeps most internet services free to use.
  • (Not for long, says Tim Hwang, Subprime Attention Crisis, 2020)
This is Your Metadata
(On Electronic Drugs)
  • Device the page is loading on
  • Location details
  • Previous websites visited and their subject matter
  • This data is used to secure the most relevant bidder for the advert space on the page
  • This all happens automatically, in a fraction of a second, and is a multi-million dollar industry
  • Personally-identifying information is not included, but campaigners argue that the volume of the data is still a violation of privacy
  • Figures do NOT include numbers from Facebook and Amazon, only Google
  • US web users' habits are shared in advert sales processes 107 trillion times per year
  • European users' data is shared 71 billion times per year

via the Irish Council for Civil Liberties: The Biggest Data Breach: ICCL report on the scale of Real-Time Bidding data broadcasts in the U.S. and Europe, May 2022. 


Researcher creates free comment moderation software for YouTube
May 2022, phys.org

"We used standard development tools to create FilterBuddy, but the features are so appreciated by the community and so desperately needed," he said. "The fact that we built this service on a shoestring budget demonstrates that at the moment, the platforms aren't paying enough attention to creators' needs."

No, the fact that you built it on a shoestring budget is proof that these companies know how to fix their problems already, but they're not profitable when they do, so they don't. 

PMA, PFAS, leaded gasoline, you name it; they know it's bad, they know how to fix it, and they have the money to fix it. They don't because we don't make them do it.

via Rutgers: Shagun Jhaver et al, Designing Word Filter Tools for Creator-led Comment Moderation, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2022). DOI: 10.1145/3491102.3517505


In Other News:
Ukraine war: Don’t underestimate Russia cyber-threat, warns US
May 2022, BBC News

One piece of perhaps surprising news though is that ransomware attacks - when computer data is encrypted and hackers demand money for it to be released - are actually down.

Mr Joyce said he believed this was partly because many of the gangs, which operate out of Russia, were finding it hard to use Western credit cards and infrastructure to launch their attacks because of sanctions.

And now for something to lighten the mood:
Highway death toll messages cause more crashes
Apr 2022, phys.org

Someone thought a great way to stop traffic deaths was to tally them on a huge digital billboard, to show to drivers, while they're driving:
The bigger the number in the fatality message, the more harmful the effects. The number of additional crashes each month increased as the death toll rose throughout the year, with the most additional crashes occurring in January when the message stated the annual total. 
They also found that crashes increased in areas where drivers experienced higher cognitive loads, such as heavy traffic or driving past multiple message boards.

The researchers suggest this "in-your-face" messaging approach weighs down drivers' "cognitive loads," temporarily impacting their ability to respond to changes in traffic conditions.
via University of Minnesota: Jonathan D. Hall et al, Can Behavioral Interventions Be Too Salient? Evidence from Traffic Safety Messages, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abm3427

Post Script:
Privacy Purchasing Agreement

Image credit: Space Elevators


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Thursday, October 14, 2021

Your Brain is a Prediction Machine


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. 

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Wednesday, June 16, 2021

On Quantum Updates and the Photon Revolution


Quantum things are a big deal these days, but you know what's even more of a big deal? Photons. Just wait, you'll be getting upgraded from the Verizon Quantum plan to the Verizon Photon plan in like 2 years tops. Photons, i.e., light, is the electricity of the 21st century. 

^That image btw: "Stimulated Photon Emission" -- Illustration of a gold-covered probe tip injecting electrons into a carefully located imperfection in an atomically thin material. The energy from each electron causes the highly localized emission of a single photon, which may then be guided to a detector. Credit: Ignacio Gaubert, 2020.

Time-reversal of an unknown quantum state
Aug 2020, phys.org

Stochastic baths, who can say no?
Abstract - In the present work, the scientists propose using a thermodynamic reservoir at finite temperatures to form a high-entropy stochastic bath to thermalize a given quantum system and experimentally increase thermal disorder or entropy in the system. 
-A. V. Lebedev et al. Time-reversal of an unknown quantum state, Communications Physics (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s42005-020-00396-0
-Seth Lloyd et al. Quantum principal component analysis, Nature Physics (2014). DOI: 10.1038/nphys3029
-Gonzalo Manzano et al. Quantum Fluctuation Theorems for Arbitrary Environments: Adiabatic and Nonadiabatic Entropy Production, Physical Review X (2018). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.8.031037
An electrical trigger fires single, identical photons
Oct 2020, phys.org

First time we're seeing "memory" used as an analogy for quantum coherence.

Also, "photons on demand"; wait for it.

via: Bruno Schuler et al, Electrically driven photon emission from individual atomic defects in monolayer WS2, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb5988

Quantum entanglement demonstrated aboard orbiting CubeSat
Jun 2020, phys.org

Quantum computing in outer space.
In a critical step toward creating a global quantum communications network, researchers have generated and detected quantum entanglement onboard a CubeSat nanosatellite weighing less than 2.6 kilograms and orbiting the Earth.
The coldest computers in the world
Aug 2020, BBC News

Also in outer space.

The world's first integrated quantum communication network
Jan 2021, phys.org

Yes they have; via the University of Science and Technology of China.

Using drones to create local quantum networks
Jan 2021, phys.org

This is what it will be like:
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has used drones to create a prototype of a small airborne quantum network. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers describe sending entangled particles from one drone to another and from a drone to the ground.
Robots learn faster with quantum technology
Mar 2021, phys.org
"We are just at the beginning of understanding the possibilities of quantum artificial intelligence" says Philip Walther, head of an international collaboration of experimental physicists, "and thus every new experimental result contributes to the development of this field, which is currently seen as one of the most fertile areas for quantum computing."
Fertile, indeed.

Photon Avalanche, Mikołaj Łukaszewicz at Polish Academy of Sciences, 2021

'Multiplying' light could be key to ultra-powerful optical computers
Feb 2021, phys.org

Using polaritons - which are half-light and half-matter

Heat-free optical switch would enable optical quantum computing chips
Mar 2021, phys.org

Molybdenum disulfide ushers in era of post-silicon photonics
Mar 2021, phys.org

Study suggests that silicon could be a photonics game-changer
Apr 2021, phys.org

In addition to being good for controlling electronic information, silicon is also good for controlling light, which will be integral to quantum computing. 

Discovered by mistake of course:
"Our finding was lucky because we weren't looking for it. We were trying to understand how a very small number of phosphorus atoms in a silicon crystal could be used for making a quantum computer and how to use light beams to control quantum information stored in the phosphorus atoms.

"We were astonished to find that the phosphorus atoms were re-emitting light beams that were almost as bright as the very intense laser we were shining on them. We shelved the data for a couple of years while we thought about proving where the beams were coming from. It's a great example of the way science proceeds by accident, and also how pan-European teams can still work together very effectively."

via University of Surrey: Nils Dessmann et al, Highly efficient THz four-wave mixing in doped silicon, Light: Science & Applications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41377-021-00509-6

Wafer-scale production of graphene-based photonic devices
Feb 2021, phys.org

It's here, graphene chips to the rescue.

via Graphene Flagship: Marco A. Giambra et al, Wafer-Scale Integration of Graphene-Based Photonic Devices, ACS Nano (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.0c09758

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