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

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-music-similar-emotions-bodily-sensations.html

• 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

https://dx.doi.org/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

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-02-music-emotionally-streamed.html

• 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.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2316306121

Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive since 1980, study finds

Mar 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-song-lyrics-simpler-repetitive.html

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.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-55742-x

 

AI Art - You Are About to Exceed the Limits of My Medication - 2024

Why some types of music make people want to dance more than others

Mar 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-music-people.html

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

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adi2525

Body mapping links responses to music with degree of uncertainty and surprise

Apr 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-body-links-responses-music-degree.html

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.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.109498

Sad music study tests the direct effect hypothesis of 'pleasurable negative emotion'

Apr 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-sad-music-effect-hypothesis-pleasurable.html

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

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299115

The Distribution of Progress

The Spirit of Truth

In 2006, the internet becomes public access tv on steroids with the dawn of YouTube. In case you forgot:

The Spirit of Truth

Ten years later...

In India, many see fake news on YouTube thanks to cheap data plans
Mar 2018, NBC

In India, a country holding 1/3 the world's people, the internet has finally taken hold. And by that we mean they're watching YouTube and getting infected by fake viruses and engineered memes.

And it looks a lot different than the same moment in other parts of the developed world about ten years ago. It's good to remember comparisons like this, because this is how progress really works.

When we imagine the future, we see it through the eyes of our own culture. But the world is a big place, and not everyone is traveling at the same speed at the same time.

Uploading our brains to the datasphere and Christopher Columbusing Mars will not happen next year. If the whole world was made of South Korea and NASA, then yes, that might be the case. But as a whole, we are worlds apart. And the speed of progress is not distributed equally across the planet.

Wiser Than You Think

The Crowd and The Life of Brian

Here at Network Address we've been interested in wisdom of the crowds for some time now. But as evidence like this starts to come out more, I wonder how much of this "wisdom of the crowds" thing has actually already been optimized by a kind of democratic voting system that we already have in place in a lot of developed countries? Like, have we known about Galton's ex-weighing trick for centuries and that's the reason why we vote the way we do? And we're just re-learning it again now because of an advance in technology?

And on the other hand, can we just translate all this to AI, because you know, they might do it better than us. (They?)

Crowds within crowd found to outperform 'wisdom of the crowd'
Jan 2018, phys.org


Post Script

The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki, 2004

Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds
Yahoo Finance, April 2016

Eyes on the Street

Computer 'anthropologists' study global fashion
Aug 2017, phys.org

What is the world wearing?

These scientists are using a deep learning object recognition program to discover visual patterns in clothing and fashion across millions of images of people worldwide and over a period of many years. They detected attributes like color, sleeve length, presence of glasses or hats, etc. (They end up filtering for only waist up photos). They ask questions such as, "How is the frequency of scarf use in the US changing over time?" or "For a given city, such as Los Angeles, what styles are most characteristic of that city."

The objective of this research is ultimately to "provide a look into cultural, social and economic factors that shape societies and provides insights into civilization."

Dashed lines mark Labor Day. Who said Americans don't like conformity?

via Cornell University: StreetStyle: Exploring world-wide clothing styles from millions of photos. arXiv. arxiv.org/abs/1706.01869

I imagined that stuff like this is already happening all over the place, in all kinds of other fields, and being integrated into global policy decisions and bottom-line business calls alike. But, this is not the case; this is still just the beginning. One thing I caught from this, some digital era common sense - Google Trends results for "scarves" peak right before they do on Instagram, because, presumably, people are searching for the thing, then they buy it, then they take pictures of themselves wearing it.

Post Script
These are the real people, not the algorithms, that analyze and predict the world of fashion:
Color Conspirators, Network Address

To Shape the Future

Crystal balls over here

Predicting the future with the wisdom of crowds
Jun 2017, phys.org

Don Moore and a team of researchers found a new way to improve that outcome by training ordinary people to make more confident and accurate predictions over time as superforecasters.

The team, working on The Good Judgment Project, had the perfect opportunity to test its future-predicting methods during a four-year government-funded geopolitical forecasting tournament sponsored by the United States Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The tournament, which began in 2011, aimed to improve geopolitical forecasting and intelligence analysis by tapping the wisdom of the crowd. Moore's team proved so successful in the first years of the competition that it bumped the other four teams from a national competition, becoming the only funded project left in the competition.

The study differs from previous research in overconfidence in forecasting because it examines accuracy in forecasting over time, using a huge and unique data set gathered during the tournament. That data included 494,552 forecasts by 2,860 forecasters who predicted the outcomes of hundreds of events.

The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki, 2004

Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds
Yahoo Finance, April 2016

The Chinese Flesh Engine
BBC 2014

POST SCRIPT

This kind of thing always reminds me of a passage from Levy-Bruhl's Primitive Mentality - the indigenous people he writes about are perplexed at the ability of the white scientists to "predict" a lunar eclipse.

They live in a timeless world. Hence, for example, an omen doesn’t just reveal what will happen, it is evidence that it is already happening.

They ask of the whites – how could you predict it (a lunar eclipse) if it was not you who caused it?

I have also found, among some folks who have less of a functioning prefrontal cortex if you know what I'm saying will tend to blame the person who predicts the situation as if they caused it. Take for example, an angsty adolescent - you tell them not to do something because of some probable result (don't smoke pot in the high school bathroom because you'll probably get caught) they will blame you as if your prediction actually caused the outcome. Some of us are no different from Levy-Bruhl's "primitives".

Primitive Mentality, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, 1923, trans 1966

Primitive Mentality
Network Address 2012

Color Conspirators

Anybody remember when triangles brainwashed the entire world for like three years? And galaxy print, i.e. indigo-purple-pink.

The people who know what colour you'll like in 2019
Apr 2017, BBC

For those of your who like conspiracy theory, maybe you should know that there are people, in fact entire incorporated business ventures, who's sole purpose is to "offer information on current and future trends in fashion, interior design and lifestyle."

"Know what's next" is the tagline of WGSN, a London-based company. And one aspect of their prescience regards color. And in this linked article above, the woman spotlighted is working on 2019. So yes, there is a global conspiracy to predict and affect the colors you will like years from now.


A couple snips from the article:
Popular colours often reflect what's happening culturally and socially.

The growth of the sharing economy, in which people rent beds, cars and other assets directly from one another, means lighter colours such as pale blues could come into fashion.

"Sharing means lightness, you don't want to be bogged down so you're not looking at a heavy palette." -Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute

Colours such as brown, which a couple of decades ago was linked to the earth and dirt but is now associated with coffee and chocolate, reflects the growth of those industries, she says.

---No idea 'sharing was light-colored' but I do remember the world getting browner for a minute, like the whole back-to-the-earth movement, actually, the one that followed the green movement, when people were feeling all guilty that they couldn't live up to their sustainability expectations, and they decided to make all white things brown, to make it look like they were using shitty detergent. jk. But really, even Starbucks changed their paper cups from white to very, very, off-white.

A "vast movement of grey" began to emerge after the 2008 financial crisis.
-Mark Woodman, a product consultant and a former president of US-based colour forecasting trade body Color Marketing Group

The color purple became more popular circa the 2012 US presidential election, when undecided and neutral states began to be identified as purple by the media.


Further, about the practicality of choosing a color-of-the-year:
"Making sure the colours are easily achievable is critically important" -Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute

---What does she mean by this, "easily achievable?" I reviewed a book on the birth of color in the modern world, called the Color Revolution, which explains how we take for granted that products are colored consistently. For example, when you buy a telephone (haha) you don't think twice that the hard plastic handset and the flexible rubberized cord are the exact same color, but that was really, really hard to do, because all these things are made with different base materials, so the coloring agents interact differently with each of them.


Finally, favorite:
The names are important too. They (Pantone) almost chose "pea soup" as the color for 2017. Settled on "greenery" instead.


And some research for good measure:
ice hockey teams wearing darker-coloured tops were more likely to be penalised for aggressive fouls
-study link

wearing the colour red could increase the probability of winning sporting contests
-study link

Note that ultimately any link between color and behavior is bound to be culture-specific, because colors mean different things in different parts of the world. (And across time as well; don't forget that the pink/blue dichotomy was originally reversed.)


POST SCRIPT

Book Review of The Color Revolution
ReginaLee Blaszczyk, MIT Press 2012

Culture as Learned Probability System
2012, Network Address

Seeing Red
2013, Network Address

Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms
2013, Network Address

On the Craft of Memetic Infection

a screenshot of predictive analytics, USA, circa 2013

Yahoo! —which, according to the American author and marketer Ryan Holiday, tests more than 45,000 combinations of headlines and images every five minutes on its home page.

What is the real cost of your online attention?
Tom Chatfield, Aeon MAgazine, 2013

If you’re using a free online service, the adage goes, you are the product. It’s an arresting line, but one that deserves putting more precisely: it’s not you, but your behavioural data and the quantifiable facts of your engagement that are constantly blended for sale, with the aggregate of every single interaction (yours included) becoming a mechanism for ever-more-finely tuning the business of attracting and retaining users.

Word Up

Brain Translation of Words:An fMRI decoding study of speech recognition
Joao Correia, Milene Bonte, Giancarlo Valente, Lars Hausfeld, Elia Formisano, Bernadette Jansma; Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, and Maastricht Brain Imaging Center (M-BIC), Maastricht, The Netherlands
Neurobiology of Language Conference; San Sebastian, Spain; October 2012

Wegman reading two books

How do we represent the meaning of words independent of the language we are listening to?

This fMRI study investigates the neural network of speech processing responsible for transforming sound to meaning, by exploring the semantic similarities between bilingual wordpairs. Eight native Dutch participants with high proficiency of English listened to four different nouns (animals), either spoken in Dutch or in English.

These nouns were presented in separate runs for each language while participants were asked to detect non-animal targets (11% of the trials) within a list of animal non-target items. Activity patterns elicited by these non-target stimuli was analyzed using Machine learning methods and multivariate classifiers.
Firstly, to identify brain regions generally involved in spoken word processing, we let the classifier discriminate between word pairs within the same language (e.g. bull vs. horse).

Secondly, to isolate language-independent semantic/conceptual representations in these regions, we assessed the ability of multivariate classifiers trained within one language (e.g. bull vs. horse) to generalize to the other language (e.g. the Dutch equivalents ‘stier’ vs. ‘paard’).

The results of our discrimination analysis show that word decoding involves a distributed network of brain regions consistent with the proposed ‘dual-stream model’ (Hickok and Poeppel, 2007). The results of our generalization analysis highlights a focal and specific role of a left anterior temporal area in semantic/concept decoding. Together, these distributed and focal brain activity patterns subserve the extraction of abstract semantic concepts from acoustically diverse English and Dutch words during bilingual speech comprehension.

note:
There is one major drawback to the process, which quashes any visions of a full-on real-time mind translation machine hitting stores anytime soon — the neural activity patterns differed slightly from person to person. Our neurons learn and identify in unique ways, and understanding these pathway patterns through machine learning would be a long process. “You would have to scan a person as they thought their way through a dictionary,” said Matt Davis of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. It would be difficult to translate a mind now without this concept map. However, we are only at the beginning of this line of study, and an algorithm could potentially be devised to aggregate hundreds of neural activity patterns to help indicate what the brain activity of an individual unable to communicate represents.
via

POST SCRIPT
Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach
H. Andrew Schwartz, Johannes C. Eichstaedt, Margaret L. Kern, Lukasz Dziurzynski, Stephanie M. Ramones, Megha Agrawal, Achal Shah, Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, Martin E. P. Seligman, Lyle H. Ungar
Sept. 25, 2013

We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’). To date, this represents the largest study, by an order of magnitude, of language and personality.
-via io9

Quantum Thought and Quantum Smearing

AKA Superposition

Schwenk Theodor (1962) Sensitive Chaos. Rudolf Steiner Press, London

Gutzwiller, M.C. (1992). Quantum chaos. Sci. Am. 266, 78 - 84

Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?
Mark Anderson, Discover Magazine, January 13, 2009

Science's weirdest realm may be responsible for photosynthesis, our sense of smell, and even consciousness itself.

Graham Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis

...photosynthesis [more energy-conversion efficient than anything created by man] appears to derive its ferocious efficiency not from the familiar physical laws that govern the visible world but from the seemingly exotic rules of quantum mechanics, the physics of the subatomic world. Somehow, in every green plant or photosynthetic bacterium, the two disparate realms of physics not only meet but mesh harmoniously. Welcome to the strange new world of quantum biology.

Quantum mechanics holds that any given particle has a chance of being in a whole range of locations and, in a sense, occupies all those places at once. Until a scientist measures the system, a particle exists in its multitude of locations. But at the time of measurement, the particle has to “choose” just a single spot. At that point, quantum physicists say, probability narrows to a single outcome and the wave function “collapses,” sending ripples of certainty through space-time. Imposing certainty on one particle could alter the characteristics of any others it has been connected with, even if those particles are now light-years away.

...new experiments keep finding quan­­tum processes at play in biological systems, says Christopher Altman, a researcher at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands. With the advent of powerful new tools like femtosecond (10-15 second) lasers and nanoscale-precision positioning, life’s quantum dance is finally coming into view.

[...]

Hydrogen Atom Orbitals

To unearth the [photosynthesizing] bacteria’s inner workings, the researchers [Fleming et. al.] zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of femto­seconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reaction centers where energy conversion takes place.

Then came the revelation: Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says.

---

...just throwing this out there; how many people haven't repeatedly experienced the phenomenon of precognitive dreams? Could your brain really be running quantum smear simulations of every possible reality, and sometimes finding a real good match that pushes itself to dream-awareness enough to remember it upon waking? Because when you think of typical precog-dreams, they actually could have been predicted if given enough time to run lots of possible simulations...time...



POST SCRIPT

Uncovering quantum secret in photosynthesis

phys.org, 20 Jun 2013

Watch the process of photosynthesis closely enough – at the femto-scale – and it appears there are little packets of energy simultaneously "trying" all of the possible paths to get where they need to go, and then settling on the most efficient.

In an article published in the journal Science, researchers from ICFO- Institute of Photonic Sciences, in collaboration with biochemists from the University of Glasgow, have been able to show for the first time at ambient conditions that the quantum mechanisms of energy transfer make photosynthesis more robust in the face of environmental influences.

Recombinant Memetics and Narrative Networks

Structural Forces

Macdonald Educational (A Unit For Teachers), published for the Schools Council by MacDonald Educational Ltd., London, 1972-1973

Recombinant Memetics

This one's quite speculative, and it's technically speaking still in the proto-science phase. But it'll only be a matter of time before scientists get a better handle on the human noosphere (the collective body of all human information) and how the proliferation of information within it impacts upon virtually all aspects of human life.

Similar to recombinant DNA (in which different genetic sequences are brought together to create something new), recombinant memetics is the study of how memes (ideas that spread from person to person) can be adjusted and merged with other memes and memeplexes (a cohesive collection of memes, like a religion) for beneficial or ‘socially therapeutic' purposes (such as combating the spread of radical and violent ideologies). This is similar to the idea of 'memetic engineering' — which philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested could be used to maintain cultural health. Or what DARPA is currently doing via their ‘narrative control' program.

11 Emerging Scientific Fields That Everyone Should Know About, George Dvorsky 27 Feb2013

The Narrative of a Japanese by Joseph Heco [link]

How to Tell a Story

Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate:

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. Another feature is the slurring of the point. A third is the dropping of a studied remark apparently without knowing it, as if one were thinking aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length--no more and no less--or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and [and if too long] the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended--and then you can't surprise them, of course.

Mark Twain [source]

tadar via Urban Ticks 11.05.2009

Darpa Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda

Dawn Lim 10.18.11http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/darpa-science-propaganda/

[clipped]

Darpa is asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.”

The program is called “Narrative Networks.” By understanding how stories have shaped your mind, the Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas, a neuroscience researcher involved in the project tells Danger Room.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/

In the first 18-month phase of the program, the Pentagon wants researchers to study how stories infiltrate social networks and alter our brain circuits.

Once scientists have perfected the science of how stories affect our neurochemistry, they will develop tools to “detect narrative influence.” These tools will enable “prevention of negative behavioral outcomes … and generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building trust.”

When the project enters into a second 18-month phase, it’ll use the research gathered to build “optimized prototype technologies in the form of documents, software, hardware and devices”.

In fact, it’s calling for devices that detect the influence of stories in unseen ways. “Efforts that rely solely on standoff/non-invasive/non-detectable sensors are highly encouraged,” [beyond micro-facial feature analysis, dilation of blood vessels/ pupils].

NARRATIVE NETWORKS Oct 07, 2011

Request for proposal, clipped [source]

 DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the areas of (1) quantitative analysis of narratives, (2) understanding the effects narratives have on human psychology and its affiliated neurobiology, and (3) modeling, simulating, and sensing-especially in stand-off modalities.

Motivation: Narratives exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity.

Story Diagram

One: Narrative Analysis. Ascertaining exactly what function stories enact, and by what mechanisms they do so… […] This goal serves to ascertain who is telling stories to whom and for what purpose, and to discover latent indicators of the spread and influence of narrative tropes in structures such as social networks, traditional and social media, and in conversation.

1. Develop new, and extend existing narrative theories. …nature of stories, including, but not limited to, a list of necessary and sufficient conditions that help distinguish narrative stimuli from other stimuli. …kinematics and dynamics of story ontology. …structure and function of narratives, including identifying and discussing aspects of narratives that are universal versus aspects that vary considerably across cultural or social contexts.

2. …role of narrative in security contexts. …role and extent stories play in influencing political violence. …political radicalization and how they can influence a person or group’s choice of means (such as indiscriminant violence) to achieve political ends. …influence bystanders-to-conflict in terms of shaping their attitudes and perceptions. …shape the process of negotiation, especially between key stakeholders. …relationship between narratives and the mechanisms that generate and reinforce psychiatric or clinical conditions. …impact of narratives on attitudes and perceptions.

3. …quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion. …establish a framework for the scientific study of the psychological and neurobiological impact of stories on people. …how stories propagate in a system so as to influence behavior. Identify temporal and spatial dimensions of narratives in different media...

Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles - edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, with an introduction by Eileen Gunn, 2010

Two: Narrative Neurobiology. Since the brain is the proximate cause of our actions, stories have a direct impact on the neurobiological processes of both the senders and receivers of narratives. …explanations of salient narrative psychological phenomena such as engagement, transportation, immersion, and synchronization are highly encouraged.

1. Assay narrative effects on our basic neurochemistry. Determine if narratives uniquely modulate human hormone or neurotransmitter production. […] Determine the manner in which narrative effects change during ontogeny and/or due to socio-economic and other environmental conditions.

2. …impact on the neurobiology of memory, learning and identity. […] Explore the differential influence of stories on neurotransmitter systems as compared to other environmental stimuli. Determine how stories impact the neurobiology of important identity-related judgments, such as whom you consider to be a member of your in-group and whom you count as an out-group member.

3. …neurobiology of emotions. Identify impacted neurobiological emotions…

4. …neurobiology of moral judgment. …neural mechanism or mechanisms by which narratives affect judgments about moral guilt and innocence, or the moral permissibility and/or impermissibility of certain actions.

5. …brain mechanisms related to social cognition. Determine how narratives differentially affect the neurobiological basis of theory of mind and judgments of the mental states of others. Identify and explore how stories influence neural mechanisms responsible for the generation and sustainment of collective action or group behavior. [MTD] Determine if and by what mechanisms stories uniquely synchronize or sustain the neural mechanisms of shared attention, collaboration, joint problem-solving and trust.

Narrative Structure [of Sucker Punch, the movie]

Three: Narrative Models, Simulations and Sensors. …understand others, detect narrative influence, and predict responses. …enable prevention of negative behavioral outcomes… …predict and quantify how and why our behavior changes as a result of narrative interaction.

1. …modeling and simulating influence. Baseline against existing models of the influence process to determine the best extant methods of understanding and forecasting influence. …consideration of narrative-driven mental and neurobiological states and the variables which influence them. …capturing the transition from changes in beliefs, desires and attitudes to actions. [MTD]

2. […] Identify whether existing influence models can be improved by the addition of a narrative “layer.” …ontology and transition states of this layer. Validate and verify the model in at least one potentially iterable testable domain (such as forecasting the success of advertising, movies, public relations campaigns or reception of disaster relief interventions).

3. Develop non-standard and novel sensor suites keyed to the variables and processes identified in new or improved influence models. Baseline against current technologies for detecting and measuring indirect indicators of neural activity (such as capillary dilation, galvanic skin response, eye pupil dilation, gaze direction, micro-facial feature analysis, etc.), and against current standoff technologies for more direct detection and measurement (such as sensing neurobiological compounds). […]

[…]

Racter: Writing Robots

03-2013

Meme Wars

05-2013

Culture as Learned Probability System

Music, the Arts and Ideas

Leonard B. Meyer, U. of Chicago, 1967

CULTURE

“It is impossible to stand outside of culture, for the models and categories we use on conceptualizing and ordering the world are necessarily limited to, if not determined by, those which are provided by our particular culture.” (viii)

“A culture, like a musical style, is a learned probability system.” (p17, footnote 21)

MEANING

“Meaning is when stimulus does not fit expectation.”

“Meaning is the difference between expectation and actual.”

Meaning, being also a measure of the uncertainty between antecedent and consequent is also related to probability.

PROBABILITY SYSTEMS

“Once a musical style has become part of the habit responses of composers, performers, and practical listeners it may be regarded as a complex system of probabilities. That musical styles are internalized probability systems is demonstrated by the rules of musical grammar and syntax found in textbooks on harmony, counterpoint, and theory in general.”

In the Tonal Harmony of Western Music, the tonic chord is
-most often followed by the dominant
-frequently by the subdominant
-sometimes by the subdominant
In Counterpoint, after a large melodic skip, the melody
-usually moves in the opposite direction, filling in the tones passed over.

DEVIATION
occurs by:

Delay – of expectation/norm
Antecedent Ambiguity/Uncertainty – equally probably constituents may be envisaged
Unexpected/Improbable – within the specific context

-deviation requires meaning, or more specifically: active creation of new meaning, which occurs within the temporal/tonal expectations

INFORMATION

Information is measured by the randomness of the choices possible in a given situation. If a situation is highly organized and the possible consequents in the pattern process have a high degree of probability, the information (or entropy) is low.

If, however, the situation is characterized by a high degree of shuffledness so that the consequents are more or less equi-probable, then information (or entropy) is said to be high.

Perception:

“What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.”
-A.N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, in G.J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, p83, in Meyers, p89.

“The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own in which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions in time.”
-William James, Principles of Psychology, 1950, p609

Predictions create the future:

“Prediction itself – that is, belief about the probable future – may make an incalculable difference in it.”

-Herbert J. Muller, “Misuses of the Past”, p12, Horizon 1 (March 1959), on Meyer, p90

The Determinism vs. Free Will Problem

Might it not be that the problem stems from a failure to distinguish between the relatively undetermined, non-statistical processes characteristic of the level of individual choice and those forces which, more determined and quasi-statistical, are operative on the higher levels of sociocultural history. It may be that the problem of determinism vs. free will stems from a confusion of hierarchic levels of analysis. (p97)

Relevant Links

The Anatomy of a Joke: Describing Meaning and Information

as a Function of Probability

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2012

The Dual Processing System

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2012

On Hindsight and Blindness, aka Greta Garbo Lips:

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2012

Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms

TUESDAY, JULY 10, 2012

Authentication

Laurie Lipton_Illusion-of-Control Tower_2010

Growing up in an era when [graffiti] artists were trying just as hard not to get figured out, as they were trying to get famous, and when the handwritten signature became a document-insertable jpeg, I watched the concept of authentication twitch and struggle to redefine itself in a world of increasingly evaporating identity.

I just finished reading Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Bursts. To grossly gloss, it says that humans are painfully predictable. If, for example, you give me access to a couple weeks of reasonable frequent mobile data, I can predict your whereabouts on any given day to an accuracy of at least 80%. Let’s also remember things like the fact that even Target can figure out you’re pregnant before you do. (Not really, but almost.)

One day I got a call from my credit card company:

“You buying some hardhats?”
“No.”
“Okay, we didn’t think so. We’re gonna open up a fraud claim and send you a new card.”

How did they know that it wasn’t me buying a couple hardhats at home depot?

People are predictable, that’s how.

Finally, this brings me to the recent Wired article,

ThePassword is Dead

I wonder then, what does one benefit in offering more personal data in exchange for a more robust, accurate prediction analysis that can be used by authentication services?

notes:

Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore

Mat Honan 11.15.12

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/11/ff-mat-honan-password-hacker/

Bursts, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2010

http://barabasi.com/bursts/

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

CHARLES DUHIGG, February 16, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

Gotcha

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/gotcha.html

A Reason for Irony

A response to The Stone article: How to Live Without Irony

credit: Leif Parsons

IRONY: “It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself [do I even need to cite Anonymous here]. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism […] to dodge responsibility…to secretly flee…”

-OR, are we just unconsciously recognizing, finally, the fallacy of causality?

Irony is a defense, “a shield against criticism” but it also a weapon, or rather, a tool. It is what we use to sift through the bullshit. It is what we use to shift the power structures.

Value? From whence, for whom? In the old clothesline paradox, as value recedes, retreats, packs it bags and gets on a plane to Iceland, we use irony to make sure it doesn’t come back home. Back home to the banks and the corporations.

Irony is a shield, not just for us the users, but for the value itself, the lambswool that hides the wolf, but, in this case, not to penetrate and attack, instead to escape, like Iranian-crisis hostages.

It is not us who are hiding. We are hiding something, a game of hot-potato, or hide-and-seek, or just keep-away, just long enough for Big Everything and Big Everyone to lose track, or lose interest.

MEANING: “Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks.” Sounds as if being absurd were a cop-out, yet the author says just prior, that being a hipster entails processing “several stages of self-scrutiny”.

In a world where it is almost possible to predict the future, (Barabasi’s Bursts, Sandy and the success of meteorological prediction, election forecasting, speculative futures, financial engineering, predictive analysis, etc…), how else can you avoid being a foregone conclusion unless you completely make no sense.

Absurdity is the antidote to the probabilistic world. Interestingly, Hipsters ^here are referred to as Harlequins; John Twelve Hawks, in his 2005 future-fiction, also writes of  Harlequins’ using random number generators to help them make decisions randomly, thus subverting the Vast Machine (or as PKD called it, the Vast Active Living Information System).

If Big Data has given us anything thus far, it is “The Search for Meaning”, and if culture has offered any comfort, any insulation, as is its purpose, it is giving us new ways of meaning, new ways of being.

How do you make meaning out of absurdity? That, of course, is the new frontier. Artists, in all regards, are  always one step ahead; Hipsters, with their slieght-of-hand tautologies, giving us a glimpse of the future, ghettouflaged in junk data – an encrypted program for a ‘way of living’: a generation not-yet has the cipher.

partially unrelated image

MODUS OPERANDI:

As my own page for a few years now has read in its subtitle: ‘Clarification, Contradiction, and Confusion’, I somehow seemed to have fallen victim to this pre-emptive defense. Or have I?

I gave feliz navidad christmas cards to my family for years (we don’t speak Spanish). It is not because I fear dislike, however, it is because I’ve tried to give away all my fucks, like an anti-Scrooge McDuck.

If I do not speak in the language of the world around me, how can I live? And yet, as such, I write, for cultural critics of the future to point out with effortless accuracy, the Greta Garbo Lips of my portraits.

BONUS:

ART THOUGHTZ: To Catch A Millennial (Live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 9-07-11)
Hennessy Youngman

NOTES:

How to Live Without Irony

CHRISTY WAMPOLE, THE STONE November 17, 2012

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/

Bursts: Can Human Behavior Be Predicted And Controlled?

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2010

http://barabasi.com/bursts/

“Sandy shows storm-prediction progress”, Business of Federal Technology

Frank Konkel, The, Nov 05, 2012

http://fcw.com/articles/2012/11/05/sandy-hurricane-center.aspx

[Argo, the 2012 film]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)

“Hidden Economies and the Shifting of Value”
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/hidden-economies-and-shifting-of-value.html

Stevens Institute, “Financial Engineering”

http://www.stevens.edu/sse/academics/graduate/financial-engineering

The Traveler, John Twelve Hawks, 2005

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Traveler_(novel)

VALIS, Philip K. Dick, 1981

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS

Greta Garbo Lips and the Van Meegeren effect, in:

The Forger’s Art, Denis Dutton, ed., 1983

http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Forger_s_Art.html?id=wV_CHAAACAAJ

POST SCRIPT:

U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder
KIM ZETTER 01.10.13
The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.
“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk told the news outlet. “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”
-Richard Berk, criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/precog-software-predicts-crime/

The Great Predictor

Behold,

...or you could just be transfixed by the power of Bruce Lee