24 ms·

Music is a negative superstimulus for speech (2020)

79 points by _Microft 5y ago

pyinstallwoes 5y ago
> So if music is a superstimulus for something, it's probably a superstimulus for speech. Speech is a superstimulus for something, it's probably a superstimulus for music. Music came first. Mimicry > Dancing > Music > Speech is my guess.
gotostatement 5y ago
- no engagement with existing literature or work on this topic - no experimental tests of theories - massive reductionism of the complex emotional & cognitive phenomenon of music into low-level game theoretical optimizations sorry, I don't see a reason to take this seriously. reminds me of jurgen schmidhubers "groundbreaking" theory of science, art, music, and humor [1] [1] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html There's nothing wrong with someone posting their ideas on a website. This forum is an internet watercooler, not an academic journal. Someone not being a specialist is no reason to shut down conversation.
  - joeberon 5y ago
    Please refrain from unconstructive dismissals, the comment you replied to was excellent and added a lot of very important context when it comes to academic work. I don't want to use a site where such comments are not permitted.
  - emsy 5y ago
    This is hardly a shallow dismissal and the comment didn’t actually criticize the lack of credentials.
    - dang 5y ago
      The point is that the comment isn't reacting curiously to anything in the article, just finding reasons to categorically reject it. That's not the intended spirit of this forum (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). And yes, I would say that all of the listed reasons are shallow. Someone not experimentally testing their theories, for example, is not a good reason to shut down conversation. Keep in mind that threads are super sensitive to initial conditions. Shallow dismissals often appear early in the life cycle of a discussion, precisely because they're so quick to jump to - and then we get a thread, and ultimately a culture, which is characterized by a mean dismissive spirit. Internet defaults already tend to mean dismissiveness, so we need to work to avoid that where possible.
  - hackcasual 5y ago
    I would disagree that pointing out a paper or idea has no cites to existing work is a shallow critique. It at the very least means the commenter glanced through the content. And while it's possible for someone who's an amateur to contribute to a topic, not engaging with the existing work is a sign that you're going to get less out of the content they've put together.
    - dang 5y ago
      I don't know what you mean by "pointing out a paper or idea". The comment seems to me a classic example of superficially skimming an article in order to find reasons to reject it. Ending with "reminds me of", followed by a link to someone else the commenter rejects, is also a shallow cheap shot. What do these things really have in common? Basically nothing. I don't mean to pick too much on one comment and certainly not personally on the GP! This is just a common problem on the internet. What we want on HN is the kind of comments that enrich curious conversation. If you really don't think there is anything curiosity-gratifying in an article, that's what flags are for.
      - hackcasual 5y ago
        Sorry, edited to actually complete my thought in the first sentence. While I do agree, in general a lot of novel ideas get dismissed out-of-hand, a conversation about to what extent an idea engages with the existing community/literature around that idea is valuable. For example, if I saw a paper posted here that claimed it solved P!=NP, my first question would be as to how much it addressed the existing work, as mathematical ideas tend to attract cranks.
      - gotostatement 5y ago
        if you don't want that type of comment on HN, feel free to remove it - it's not a big deal to me. But it's not a shallow critique - this article makes grand claims about how the brain works that are not backed up by any experiment or reference; it's reducing an extremely complex phenomenon - music and subjective experience of music - to a simple cognitive processing and meaning-making framework; and none of this makes any reference to work that other people have done on the matter. If you consider this a shallow critique, then I have to think that the only thing you wouldn't consider shallow is engaging deeply with the content, but that's not fair - for the reasons I gave, my contribution is claiming that this not worth engaging further with - it's crankery
_Microft 5y ago
If you found that interesting, make sure to have a look at the list of other articles on that blog. It's all written by the same author, a trained mathematician - now software dev, on the quest to figure out what music actually is. You can see it as a sort of log of his efforts, ideas, dead-ends... https://whatismusic.info/blog/index.html https://whatismusic.info/blog/index.html
- akomtu 5y ago
  My favorite definition of music is the one given by Schopenhauer: "Absolutely direct experience of the will is impossible, because it will always be mediated by time, but in first-personal experience of volition and the experience of music the thing in itself is no longer veiled by our other forms of cognitive conditioning." There's also a less poetic, but I believe a more accurate definition in the blog you've linked: "Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which doesn't know that it is counting." (Gottfried Leibniz)
  - analog31 5y ago
    I prefer a pragmatic definition: Music is any remunerative activity involving a bass player.
  - pjdorrell 5y ago
    All definitions of the word "music" that anyone has ever come up with are wrong. We only know what the word "music" means from our own subjective experience of listening to specific examples of music. At most we can observe common features of musical items, and include a description of those features in a definition. But such a definition will fall way short of accurately separating what is music from what is not music. There are other subjective phenomena that we have words for, but for most subjective phenomena we have _some_ objective understanding of what is going on. Music seems to win the prize for being both very familiar _and_ very mysterious.
skulk 5y ago
This is a pleasant hypothesis, but what does it imply? Is there a bijection between music and speech, or some sort of structure there to investigate?
- javajosh 5y ago
  Well for one thing it explains why I can't speak when playing piano!
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    There with you. I can't formulate words and speak them while listening to music, but I can write them. Interesting that it blocks words to speech, but not words to fingers. > In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. > (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.) On this statement of his, however, I'd disagree. If you have ever watched the show Letterkenny, the banter is clearly musical. I have friends that went to school with the creators, and that style of south/central Ontario banter is very much a thing, we can do it on cue. Theatre people can have a certain way as well, where stories told by stage actors are often sonorous and rhythmic. Some British trained actors begin to speak from their lower registers (think Ian McKellen or Patrick Stewart) Then again, maybe part of being a great presence as an actor is stupefying an audience with a musical voice. I've met hypnotist/NLP practitioners who work on rhythm and tone in their speech, and this could be construed as a technique for disarming and neutralizing critical faculties. Personally, the idea that there is an out of band way to mesmerize people by turning off their critical and conversational faculties using rhythmic musical intonation is too much existential horror for me to accept. I'll stick to writing, thank you.
    - memco 5y ago
      > In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. > (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.) I sometimes try to sing my requests to my daughter when my willpower to repeat the request has run out. It never helps improve her response, but it helps me stay motivated.
deleted 5y ago
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_Microft 5y ago
What could an experiment look like that tested this hypothesis?
- deleted 5y ago
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- admiral33 5y ago
  Have a group individually describe a series of simple images under a time constraint. Set a threshold for frequency changes in each description to determine 'more musical' or 'less musical' entries (voice to MIDI?). Shuffle the descriptions, have a second group individually listen to one description for each image and draw a picture under time constraint. Shuffle the drawings, display 2 at a time and the original image and have a third group individually vote for which comes closer to the source image. I've never designed an academic study just contributing - I'd assume drawing ability is a big weak point. Or maybe show the original image in addition to similar images (with one key element different in each one) and have the second group select the image that most closely resembles the description.
jack_pp 5y ago
I found it is hard to read even when listening to music without lyrics.. it's like my inner voice is coming from a well so this is not surprising
abetusk 5y ago
The language is pretty terse, so it's hard to get a concise idea of what's being proposed. I think another one of their posts tries to put it more concisely (thanks to _Microft for the link) [0]: """ 1. Truly spontaneous speech is un-musical. 2. The perception of non-spontaneity in speech suppresses the evaluation of truth. 3. When truth evaluation is suppressed, hypothetical emotions retain their full intensity. """ Or, put another way, "Spontaneous speech is un-musical. Musical speech suppresses the critical thinking in favor of emotion. Since musical speech allows circumvents critical reasoning, this allows for more intense emotional impact of music/musical speech". If I've understood the hypothesis correctly, this gives the basis for understanding why music has (more) emotional impact than just speech. [0] https://whatismusic.info/blog/TheNegativeSuperstimulusTheoryInThreeSentences.html https://whatismusic.info/blog/TheNegativeSuperstimulusTheory...
- steverb 5y ago
  And why so many Christian preachers use a very sing song tone (and even sing in some traditions).
  - abetusk 5y ago
    Andre Antunes does satirical takes on the effect [0] [1] [2]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPRvxTjfOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPRvxTjfOk [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZFt9KUvYs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZFt9KUvYs8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OxYUhAZOy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OxYUhAZOy0
    - recuter 5y ago
      Thank you from the bottom of my cold dark dead heart for posting these links. :)
  - ksaj 5y ago
    Diana Deutsch studied this from essentially the opposite direction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zr9BU0bJoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zr9BU0bJoc It's in our speech all the time. Preachers do exaggerate it. As do politicians and comedians, for example. But Diana pulls it right out of her own speech, and demonstrates that even children instantly recognize the musicality of it as soon as the bit of speech is repeated.
artfulhippo 5y ago
This thread, and the author's blog which I've but skimmed, are to me a microcosm of the clash between 2 archetypes that roughly correspond to Science and the Liberal Arts; let's call them Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 aims to formally represent the world in patterns of symbols, with maximal simplicity. Type 2 aims to explore the complexity of the world, with maximal nuance. Type 1 finds value in constructing reductive models that are wrong but maybe useful to influence life in the world. Type 2 seeks freedom from models that reduce life into forms that can be easily influenced. To Type 1, the discovery of a computational model or equation or diagram that explains art or mysticism is a Holy Grail to pursue at all cost. To Type 2, art and mysticism are effectively defined as that which is inherently beyond the grasp of a formal model. With such a gap in outlook and purpose, it's hard to communicate, to convey information that can be integrated across perspectives. Indeed, the gap is so large that the meanings and connotations of words like "reductive" and "wrong" are only worth quoting from a particular frame of reference.
- bbreier 5y ago
  I really enjoy the chicken-and-egg-esque meta implications of this comment, that you are of the Type 1 persuasion and therefore find value in this reductive model of human thought. I instinctually grasp for nuance away from these two modes, which ironically seems to put me squarely in Type 2 (even though I often find value in reductive models). Trying to dig deeper into this just feels like zooming in on a fractal.
  - xattt 5y ago
    There is still some mysticism that exists embedded in a type 1 world. Nursing literature sometimes refers to nurses’ intuition, which is an indescribable feeling that something is wrong with a patient but you can’t quite describe what it is. Otherwise, nursing is very much a type 1 world of models that describe how nurses interact with the world around them.
  - eecc 5y ago
    Yup, the moment you squint hard enough it's turtles all the way down. And it's beautiful like that.
Grismar 5y ago
That's an interesting theory, but where is the data, what is the evidence, has anyone tried to falsify it?
- deleted 5y ago
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wyager 5y ago
Presumably the same mechanism would be at work for other forms of obviously fictionalized narrative communication, like plays or novels. I think another way of stating the OP could be "music induces suspension of disbelief". I'm not sure this model explains why people like or even prefer music with no/incomprehensible vocals.
zuminator 5y ago
The blogger draws some questionable conclusions here. He says, "If music is a positive superstimulus for some aspect of speech perception, then this implies that music is perceived as being a 'better speech than speech.'" But that's not really the case. For example, junk food has been called a superstimulus compared with regular food. It stimulates us to eat it more strongly than the more nutritious fare our appetite evolved for, and thereby replaces regular food, to our detriment. It's not that it's better, simply that it's more stimulating, to the point of usurping the correct stimulant. Music is a negative superstimulus in the sense that it causes the listener's brain to put less effort into processing the meaning of something. He continues: "If this is the case, then speakers would be expected to exploit this perception by making their speech more musical in any situation where they are speaking and they want their speech to have more effect on the listener. But this doesn't happen." To which I would say, in the first instance, that this is a very narrow view of how a superstimulus works. Porn has been called a superstimulus (being more pleasurable to some and usurping the role of physical sex.) But, according to this blogger, I can disprove that by asserting, "Porn can't be a superstimulant because if it were, people would routinely make themselves sexy to others by inviting them to watch porn videos." But secondly I disagree that people never make their speech musical for added effect. Think about when your parents would call you as a child. "MAR-LOW...come take out the GAR-BAGE" in a sing-song voice for added effect. Furthermore, music can entirely take the place of speech to provide a more stimulating environment. Many people would judge a party where music is playing to be more stimulating and pleasurable than a party where there is just conversation taking place. But that aside, what he says is true that people don't generally sing to each other in the place of normal speech. But that's true for the same reason that people don't normally recite limericks to each other in the place of normal speech. Songs (and limericks) are not meant to be forms of spontaneous communication. I also question the whole concept of a "negative superstimulus." He calls music a "worse speech than speech." But that's nothing special, it's how superstimuli typically work. In usurping the normal stimulant, they have a negative effect, or at least, lack the full range of beneficial effects that the normal stimulant would have. And finally, using spontaneity as a measure of the effectiveness of communication, let's concede that point, for the sake of argument. Isn't everything that music lacks also lacking in the written word? In spoken prose and poetry? Essentially, in any non-spontaneous form of communication? In that case, why single out music? I mean, what he's calling "music" is music+lyrics, in any case. Is he asserting that reciting the lyrics without the accompanying music would enable listeners to ascertain the truth value? Or that just the accompanying music, without the lyrics, is not a ("negative") superstimulant?
JoeDaDude 5y ago
I took this course on Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why [1] a while back and the presenter had lots of data showing similarities between speech and music, in fact saying we humans like music because it is very speech like to our perceptions. [1]. https://www.coursera.org/learn/music-as-biology https://www.coursera.org/learn/music-as-biology
o_____________o 5y ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect
optimalsolver 5y ago
Related to the concept of supernormal musical stimuli, I've often wondered about the existence of currently hypothetical "strong music", a class of musical stimuli presumably discoverable by strong AI. Any property, in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. So through a really powerful search process (read: artificial general intelligence) that can more efficiently explore remote, undiscovered regions of music-space, we could get music-patterns more alluring and emotionally stimulating than any currently imaginable. What these songs would sound like is the real mystery. Would they sound anything like the music we're familiar with? Would they lead to musical wireheading [0]? It also seems a bad idea to measure musical goodness by, say, how many times humans will replay a certain audio file. If you use this measure, I don't think you'll end with what you want at all. See also: "Siren Worlds And The Perils Of Over-Optimised Search." [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nFv2buafNc9jSaxAH/siren-worlds-and-the-perils-of-over-optimised-search https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nFv2buafNc9jSaxAH/siren-worl...
- munificent 5y ago
  > in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. There is a huge presumption here which is that all humans share the same reward maximization function. In other words, that culture, upbringing, personal history, and random variation don't strongly affect it. I don't see much evidence that this is true. It's more likely that, yes, there are sounds that have profoundly great effects on people, but each has their own. I would be very surprised if some AI trained on a global dataset could produce a set of sinusoids that tickled my neurons to anywhere near the same degree as the sound of my daughter's voice saying she loves me, or the song I heard when I was falling in love for the first time. Remember, each of us is our own unique highly mutable neural net too.
  - 5y ago
nathias 5y ago
Presents Plato's thesis as his own, poor form, very poor.
7373737373 5y ago
I'd love to see an elaboration on what implications music preferences would have
munificent 5y ago
This is a pretty interesting theory. 1. The listener determines the meaning of what the speaker said. 2. The listener determines the emotional significance of the meaning of what the speaker said. 3. The listener determines whether of not the speaker's speech is spontaneous. 4. The listener determines their belief about the truth of what the speaker said, but, the amount of effort put into this determination is proportional to the perceived level of spontaneity in the speaker's speech. 5. The listener responds to the speaker, where their response includes an indication of their belief about the truth of what the speaker said. I think the truth-value part of this might be off track. Here's a slightly different hypothesis: Speech carries two separate signals: information and emotion. The former is world-state data, and the latter is signal about the emotional state of the speaker. In a social species like humans, both are critical. We might process those two channels of data with different parts of our brain even though the source signal has them merged together into one single sound. Imagine an audio processing pipeline that strips the literal informational content out and shunts it one way and takes the emotional affect another way. The informational content needs to be processed actively with full attention from our frontal cortex. We have to pay attention to it. We don't seem to absorb detailed information "in the background" well. I don't know anyone who can, say, read a book and listen to a non-fiction podcast at the same time. Emotional content doesn't need our active attention. It's something we can absorb passively. We use words like "feel", "vibe", "mood", and "ambience" to describe it. OK, so you've got a speech-like sound that contains information and emotion. How do you decide how much attention to pay to it? Information is more likely to be useful if it's fresh, so sounding spontaneous is a positive signal for information content. As the author supposes, music is a negative superstimulus for that. It's audio that contains no informational content and only emotion, which it telegraphs by sounding extremely rehearsed (repetitive rhythm, wide melodic swings). That lets our brain know that we don't have to pay active, logical attention to it. That's pleasant because it frees us to think about what we like while absorbing the music emotionally in the background. This helps explain why some like me do like listening to music while programming, but not music with lyrics. Non-lyrical music helps me focus my attention on code because it sends a signal that I don't have to pay attention to it. This may also explain why religions, cults, and demogogues use such sing-song like speaking styles: it encourages the audience to mentally switch off and not think as critically about what they are hearing as they might otherwise.
jasonhansel 5y ago
According to this theory, we ignore the question of whether the words of a song are true. But this seems to ignore the long tradition of didactic poetry, which was typically sung rather than simply read aloud. How would this theory account for Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, for instance, or Hesiod's Works and Days? These are musical works, intended for singing, but they are also supposed to convey fairly detailed factual information to the listener. We still use song for similar purposes today (e.g. in religious hymns) so this shouldn't be too surprising.
danbmil99 5y ago
> In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. Except in musicals. Perhaps that's why there's a sort of uncanny valley feeling to watching people "spontaneously" burst into song.
slmjkdbtl 5y ago
> In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. > (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.) I have invented 2 games: - sing everything you have to say - rap everything you have to say These have occasionally gave me great joy in recreational everyday speaking (only for close friends with humor of course)
MauranKilom 5y ago
So how does this square with the Speech-to-Song illusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion
- pjdorrell 5y ago
  In the Speech-to-Song illusion, recorded speech is altered so that there are one or more exact repetitions. These exact repetitions are something that never occur in spontaneous conversational speech.
  - MauranKilom 5y ago
    But there is more to it than repetition. People will keep hearing the sentence as music even much later, without repetition at that point. It becomes (and remains) "musical" speech, even though it originally was not.
Tossrock 5y ago
Despite being presented in language which suggests that this is somehow settled science, it's actually trivially false given the existence of obvious counterexamples, eg music which provokes an emotional response without any lyrics to be evaluated for truth, or music with lyrics in a language the listener doesn't speak and cannot evaluate the truth of. This is pure, unfounded speculation masquerading as insight.
- trgn 5y ago
  100% Music is embodied, more so than speech. The real relationship between communication and some axiomatic irreducible form of human expression flows the other way. Good literature is close to poetry, good poetry is close to music, good music is close to dance. And dance is the sublimation of sex or combat. Communication as an artful expression, the closest thing to conveying Truth, comes from within, it precedes consciousness. Music is much closer to that than speech. We are much less human when without music, than we are when without speech.
  - leobg 5y ago
    So porn is the highest form of human expression?
- quocanh 5y ago
  Absolutely. You can spot the logical leap when the author goes from "music COULD BE a superstimulus for speech" to "music IS a superstimulus for speech" with absolutely no evidence or argument in between.
bazeblackwood 5y ago
> In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. An incredibly wrongheaded assertion made without a lick of evidence.
tpoacher 5y ago
Counterexample: "This was a triumph. I'm making a note here, huge success. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction."

79 points by _Microft 5y ago

> So if music is a superstimulus for something, it's probably a superstimulus for speech. Speech is a superstimulus for something, it's probably a superstimulus for music. Music came first. Mimicry > Dancing > Music > Speech is my guess.

gotostatement 5y ago

- no engagement with existing literature or work on this topic - no experimental tests of theories - massive reductionism of the complex emotional & cognitive phenomenon of music into low-level game theoretical optimizations sorry, I don't see a reason to take this seriously. reminds me of jurgen schmidhubers "groundbreaking" theory of science, art, music, and humor [1] [1] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html

dang 5y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html There's nothing wrong with someone posting their ideas on a website. This forum is an internet watercooler, not an academic journal. Someone not being a specialist is no reason to shut down conversation.
- joeberon 5y ago
  Please refrain from unconstructive dismissals, the comment you replied to was excellent and added a lot of very important context when it comes to academic work. I don't want to use a site where such comments are not permitted.
- emsy 5y ago
  This is hardly a shallow dismissal and the comment didn’t actually criticize the lack of credentials.
  - dang 5y ago
    The point is that the comment isn't reacting curiously to anything in the article, just finding reasons to categorically reject it. That's not the intended spirit of this forum (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). And yes, I would say that all of the listed reasons are shallow. Someone not experimentally testing their theories, for example, is not a good reason to shut down conversation. Keep in mind that threads are super sensitive to initial conditions. Shallow dismissals often appear early in the life cycle of a discussion, precisely because they're so quick to jump to - and then we get a thread, and ultimately a culture, which is characterized by a mean dismissive spirit. Internet defaults already tend to mean dismissiveness, so we need to work to avoid that where possible.
- hackcasual 5y ago
  I would disagree that pointing out a paper or idea has no cites to existing work is a shallow critique. It at the very least means the commenter glanced through the content. And while it's possible for someone who's an amateur to contribute to a topic, not engaging with the existing work is a sign that you're going to get less out of the content they've put together.
  - dang 5y ago
    I don't know what you mean by "pointing out a paper or idea". The comment seems to me a classic example of superficially skimming an article in order to find reasons to reject it. Ending with "reminds me of", followed by a link to someone else the commenter rejects, is also a shallow cheap shot. What do these things really have in common? Basically nothing. I don't mean to pick too much on one comment and certainly not personally on the GP! This is just a common problem on the internet. What we want on HN is the kind of comments that enrich curious conversation. If you really don't think there is anything curiosity-gratifying in an article, that's what flags are for.
    - hackcasual 5y ago
      Sorry, edited to actually complete my thought in the first sentence. While I do agree, in general a lot of novel ideas get dismissed out-of-hand, a conversation about to what extent an idea engages with the existing community/literature around that idea is valuable. For example, if I saw a paper posted here that claimed it solved P!=NP, my first question would be as to how much it addressed the existing work, as mathematical ideas tend to attract cranks.
    - gotostatement 5y ago
      if you don't want that type of comment on HN, feel free to remove it - it's not a big deal to me. But it's not a shallow critique - this article makes grand claims about how the brain works that are not backed up by any experiment or reference; it's reducing an extremely complex phenomenon - music and subjective experience of music - to a simple cognitive processing and meaning-making framework; and none of this makes any reference to work that other people have done on the matter. If you consider this a shallow critique, then I have to think that the only thing you wouldn't consider shallow is engaging deeply with the content, but that's not fair - for the reasons I gave, my contribution is claiming that this not worth engaging further with - it's crankery

_Microft 5y ago

If you found that interesting, make sure to have a look at the list of other articles on that blog. It's all written by the same author, a trained mathematician - now software dev, on the quest to figure out what music actually is. You can see it as a sort of log of his efforts, ideas, dead-ends... https://whatismusic.info/blog/index.html https://whatismusic.info/blog/index.html

akomtu 5y ago
My favorite definition of music is the one given by Schopenhauer: "Absolutely direct experience of the will is impossible, because it will always be mediated by time, but in first-personal experience of volition and the experience of music the thing in itself is no longer veiled by our other forms of cognitive conditioning." There's also a less poetic, but I believe a more accurate definition in the blog you've linked: "Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which doesn't know that it is counting." (Gottfried Leibniz)
- analog31 5y ago
  I prefer a pragmatic definition: Music is any remunerative activity involving a bass player.
- pjdorrell 5y ago
  All definitions of the word "music" that anyone has ever come up with are wrong. We only know what the word "music" means from our own subjective experience of listening to specific examples of music. At most we can observe common features of musical items, and include a description of those features in a definition. But such a definition will fall way short of accurately separating what is music from what is not music. There are other subjective phenomena that we have words for, but for most subjective phenomena we have _some_ objective understanding of what is going on. Music seems to win the prize for being both very familiar _and_ very mysterious.

skulk 5y ago

This is a pleasant hypothesis, but what does it imply? Is there a bijection between music and speech, or some sort of structure there to investigate?

javajosh 5y ago
Well for one thing it explains why I can't speak when playing piano!
- motohagiography 5y ago
  There with you. I can't formulate words and speak them while listening to music, but I can write them. Interesting that it blocks words to speech, but not words to fingers. > In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. > (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.) On this statement of his, however, I'd disagree. If you have ever watched the show Letterkenny, the banter is clearly musical. I have friends that went to school with the creators, and that style of south/central Ontario banter is very much a thing, we can do it on cue. Theatre people can have a certain way as well, where stories told by stage actors are often sonorous and rhythmic. Some British trained actors begin to speak from their lower registers (think Ian McKellen or Patrick Stewart) Then again, maybe part of being a great presence as an actor is stupefying an audience with a musical voice. I've met hypnotist/NLP practitioners who work on rhythm and tone in their speech, and this could be construed as a technique for disarming and neutralizing critical faculties. Personally, the idea that there is an out of band way to mesmerize people by turning off their critical and conversational faculties using rhythmic musical intonation is too much existential horror for me to accept. I'll stick to writing, thank you.
  - memco 5y ago
    > In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. > (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.) I sometimes try to sing my requests to my daughter when my willpower to repeat the request has run out. It never helps improve her response, but it helps me stay motivated.

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_Microft 5y ago

What could an experiment look like that tested this hypothesis?

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admiral33 5y ago
Have a group individually describe a series of simple images under a time constraint. Set a threshold for frequency changes in each description to determine 'more musical' or 'less musical' entries (voice to MIDI?). Shuffle the descriptions, have a second group individually listen to one description for each image and draw a picture under time constraint. Shuffle the drawings, display 2 at a time and the original image and have a third group individually vote for which comes closer to the source image. I've never designed an academic study just contributing - I'd assume drawing ability is a big weak point. Or maybe show the original image in addition to similar images (with one key element different in each one) and have the second group select the image that most closely resembles the description.

jack_pp 5y ago

I found it is hard to read even when listening to music without lyrics.. it's like my inner voice is coming from a well so this is not surprising

abetusk 5y ago

The language is pretty terse, so it's hard to get a concise idea of what's being proposed. I think another one of their posts tries to put it more concisely (thanks to _Microft for the link) [0]: """ 1. Truly spontaneous speech is un-musical. 2. The perception of non-spontaneity in speech suppresses the evaluation of truth. 3. When truth evaluation is suppressed, hypothetical emotions retain their full intensity. """ Or, put another way, "Spontaneous speech is un-musical. Musical speech suppresses the critical thinking in favor of emotion. Since musical speech allows circumvents critical reasoning, this allows for more intense emotional impact of music/musical speech". If I've understood the hypothesis correctly, this gives the basis for understanding why music has (more) emotional impact than just speech. [0] https://whatismusic.info/blog/TheNegativeSuperstimulusTheoryInThreeSentences.html https://whatismusic.info/blog/TheNegativeSuperstimulusTheory...

steverb 5y ago
And why so many Christian preachers use a very sing song tone (and even sing in some traditions).
- abetusk 5y ago
  Andre Antunes does satirical takes on the effect [0] [1] [2]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPRvxTjfOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPRvxTjfOk [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZFt9KUvYs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZFt9KUvYs8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OxYUhAZOy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OxYUhAZOy0
  - recuter 5y ago
    Thank you from the bottom of my cold dark dead heart for posting these links. :)
- ksaj 5y ago
  Diana Deutsch studied this from essentially the opposite direction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zr9BU0bJoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zr9BU0bJoc It's in our speech all the time. Preachers do exaggerate it. As do politicians and comedians, for example. But Diana pulls it right out of her own speech, and demonstrates that even children instantly recognize the musicality of it as soon as the bit of speech is repeated.

artfulhippo 5y ago

This thread, and the author's blog which I've but skimmed, are to me a microcosm of the clash between 2 archetypes that roughly correspond to Science and the Liberal Arts; let's call them Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 aims to formally represent the world in patterns of symbols, with maximal simplicity. Type 2 aims to explore the complexity of the world, with maximal nuance. Type 1 finds value in constructing reductive models that are wrong but maybe useful to influence life in the world. Type 2 seeks freedom from models that reduce life into forms that can be easily influenced. To Type 1, the discovery of a computational model or equation or diagram that explains art or mysticism is a Holy Grail to pursue at all cost. To Type 2, art and mysticism are effectively defined as that which is inherently beyond the grasp of a formal model. With such a gap in outlook and purpose, it's hard to communicate, to convey information that can be integrated across perspectives. Indeed, the gap is so large that the meanings and connotations of words like "reductive" and "wrong" are only worth quoting from a particular frame of reference.

bbreier 5y ago
I really enjoy the chicken-and-egg-esque meta implications of this comment, that you are of the Type 1 persuasion and therefore find value in this reductive model of human thought. I instinctually grasp for nuance away from these two modes, which ironically seems to put me squarely in Type 2 (even though I often find value in reductive models). Trying to dig deeper into this just feels like zooming in on a fractal.
- xattt 5y ago
  There is still some mysticism that exists embedded in a type 1 world. Nursing literature sometimes refers to nurses’ intuition, which is an indescribable feeling that something is wrong with a patient but you can’t quite describe what it is. Otherwise, nursing is very much a type 1 world of models that describe how nurses interact with the world around them.
- eecc 5y ago
  Yup, the moment you squint hard enough it's turtles all the way down. And it's beautiful like that.

Grismar 5y ago

That's an interesting theory, but where is the data, what is the evidence, has anyone tried to falsify it?

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wyager 5y ago

Presumably the same mechanism would be at work for other forms of obviously fictionalized narrative communication, like plays or novels. I think another way of stating the OP could be "music induces suspension of disbelief". I'm not sure this model explains why people like or even prefer music with no/incomprehensible vocals.

zuminator 5y ago

The blogger draws some questionable conclusions here. He says, "If music is a positive superstimulus for some aspect of speech perception, then this implies that music is perceived as being a 'better speech than speech.'" But that's not really the case. For example, junk food has been called a superstimulus compared with regular food. It stimulates us to eat it more strongly than the more nutritious fare our appetite evolved for, and thereby replaces regular food, to our detriment. It's not that it's better, simply that it's more stimulating, to the point of usurping the correct stimulant. Music is a negative superstimulus in the sense that it causes the listener's brain to put less effort into processing the meaning of something. He continues: "If this is the case, then speakers would be expected to exploit this perception by making their speech more musical in any situation where they are speaking and they want their speech to have more effect on the listener. But this doesn't happen." To which I would say, in the first instance, that this is a very narrow view of how a superstimulus works. Porn has been called a superstimulus (being more pleasurable to some and usurping the role of physical sex.) But, according to this blogger, I can disprove that by asserting, "Porn can't be a superstimulant because if it were, people would routinely make themselves sexy to others by inviting them to watch porn videos." But secondly I disagree that people never make their speech musical for added effect. Think about when your parents would call you as a child. "MAR-LOW...come take out the GAR-BAGE" in a sing-song voice for added effect. Furthermore, music can entirely take the place of speech to provide a more stimulating environment. Many people would judge a party where music is playing to be more stimulating and pleasurable than a party where there is just conversation taking place. But that aside, what he says is true that people don't generally sing to each other in the place of normal speech. But that's true for the same reason that people don't normally recite limericks to each other in the place of normal speech. Songs (and limericks) are not meant to be forms of spontaneous communication. I also question the whole concept of a "negative superstimulus." He calls music a "worse speech than speech." But that's nothing special, it's how superstimuli typically work. In usurping the normal stimulant, they have a negative effect, or at least, lack the full range of beneficial effects that the normal stimulant would have. And finally, using spontaneity as a measure of the effectiveness of communication, let's concede that point, for the sake of argument. Isn't everything that music lacks also lacking in the written word? In spoken prose and poetry? Essentially, in any non-spontaneous form of communication? In that case, why single out music? I mean, what he's calling "music" is music+lyrics, in any case. Is he asserting that reciting the lyrics without the accompanying music would enable listeners to ascertain the truth value? Or that just the accompanying music, without the lyrics, is not a ("negative") superstimulant?

JoeDaDude 5y ago

I took this course on Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why [1] a while back and the presenter had lots of data showing similarities between speech and music, in fact saying we humans like music because it is very speech like to our perceptions. [1]. https://www.coursera.org/learn/music-as-biology https://www.coursera.org/learn/music-as-biology

o_____________o 5y ago

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect

optimalsolver 5y ago

Related to the concept of supernormal musical stimuli, I've often wondered about the existence of currently hypothetical "strong music", a class of musical stimuli presumably discoverable by strong AI. Any property, in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. So through a really powerful search process (read: artificial general intelligence) that can more efficiently explore remote, undiscovered regions of music-space, we could get music-patterns more alluring and emotionally stimulating than any currently imaginable. What these songs would sound like is the real mystery. Would they sound anything like the music we're familiar with? Would they lead to musical wireheading [0]? It also seems a bad idea to measure musical goodness by, say, how many times humans will replay a certain audio file. If you use this measure, I don't think you'll end with what you want at all. See also: "Siren Worlds And The Perils Of Over-Optimised Search." [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nFv2buafNc9jSaxAH/siren-worlds-and-the-perils-of-over-optimised-search https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nFv2buafNc9jSaxAH/siren-worl...

munificent 5y ago
> in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. There is a huge presumption here which is that all humans share the same reward maximization function. In other words, that culture, upbringing, personal history, and random variation don't strongly affect it. I don't see much evidence that this is true. It's more likely that, yes, there are sounds that have profoundly great effects on people, but each has their own. I would be very surprised if some AI trained on a global dataset could produce a set of sinusoids that tickled my neurons to anywhere near the same degree as the sound of my daughter's voice saying she loves me, or the song I heard when I was falling in love for the first time. Remember, each of us is our own unique highly mutable neural net too.
- 5y ago

nathias 5y ago

Presents Plato's thesis as his own, poor form, very poor.

7373737373 5y ago

I'd love to see an elaboration on what implications music preferences would have

munificent 5y ago

This is a pretty interesting theory. 1. The listener determines the meaning of what the speaker said. 2. The listener determines the emotional significance of the meaning of what the speaker said. 3. The listener determines whether of not the speaker's speech is spontaneous. 4. The listener determines their belief about the truth of what the speaker said, but, the amount of effort put into this determination is proportional to the perceived level of spontaneity in the speaker's speech. 5. The listener responds to the speaker, where their response includes an indication of their belief about the truth of what the speaker said. I think the truth-value part of this might be off track. Here's a slightly different hypothesis: Speech carries two separate signals: information and emotion. The former is world-state data, and the latter is signal about the emotional state of the speaker. In a social species like humans, both are critical. We might process those two channels of data with different parts of our brain even though the source signal has them merged together into one single sound. Imagine an audio processing pipeline that strips the literal informational content out and shunts it one way and takes the emotional affect another way. The informational content needs to be processed actively with full attention from our frontal cortex. We have to pay attention to it. We don't seem to absorb detailed information "in the background" well. I don't know anyone who can, say, read a book and listen to a non-fiction podcast at the same time. Emotional content doesn't need our active attention. It's something we can absorb passively. We use words like "feel", "vibe", "mood", and "ambience" to describe it. OK, so you've got a speech-like sound that contains information and emotion. How do you decide how much attention to pay to it? Information is more likely to be useful if it's fresh, so sounding spontaneous is a positive signal for information content. As the author supposes, music is a negative superstimulus for that. It's audio that contains no informational content and only emotion, which it telegraphs by sounding extremely rehearsed (repetitive rhythm, wide melodic swings). That lets our brain know that we don't have to pay active, logical attention to it. That's pleasant because it frees us to think about what we like while absorbing the music emotionally in the background. This helps explain why some like me do like listening to music while programming, but not music with lyrics. Non-lyrical music helps me focus my attention on code because it sends a signal that I don't have to pay attention to it. This may also explain why religions, cults, and demogogues use such sing-song like speaking styles: it encourages the audience to mentally switch off and not think as critically about what they are hearing as they might otherwise.

jasonhansel 5y ago

According to this theory, we ignore the question of whether the words of a song are true. But this seems to ignore the long tradition of didactic poetry, which was typically sung rather than simply read aloud. How would this theory account for Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, for instance, or Hesiod's Works and Days? These are musical works, intended for singing, but they are also supposed to convey fairly detailed factual information to the listener. We still use song for similar purposes today (e.g. in religious hymns) so this shouldn't be too surprising.

danbmil99 5y ago

> In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. Except in musicals. Perhaps that's why there's a sort of uncanny valley feeling to watching people "spontaneously" burst into song.

slmjkdbtl 5y ago

> In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. > (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.) I have invented 2 games: - sing everything you have to say - rap everything you have to say These have occasionally gave me great joy in recreational everyday speaking (only for close friends with humor of course)

MauranKilom 5y ago

So how does this square with the Speech-to-Song illusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion

pjdorrell 5y ago
In the Speech-to-Song illusion, recorded speech is altered so that there are one or more exact repetitions. These exact repetitions are something that never occur in spontaneous conversational speech.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  But there is more to it than repetition. People will keep hearing the sentence as music even much later, without repetition at that point. It becomes (and remains) "musical" speech, even though it originally was not.

Tossrock 5y ago

Despite being presented in language which suggests that this is somehow settled science, it's actually trivially false given the existence of obvious counterexamples, eg music which provokes an emotional response without any lyrics to be evaluated for truth, or music with lyrics in a language the listener doesn't speak and cannot evaluate the truth of. This is pure, unfounded speculation masquerading as insight.

trgn 5y ago
100% Music is embodied, more so than speech. The real relationship between communication and some axiomatic irreducible form of human expression flows the other way. Good literature is close to poetry, good poetry is close to music, good music is close to dance. And dance is the sublimation of sex or combat. Communication as an artful expression, the closest thing to conveying Truth, comes from within, it precedes consciousness. Music is much closer to that than speech. We are much less human when without music, than we are when without speech.
- leobg 5y ago
  So porn is the highest form of human expression?
quocanh 5y ago
Absolutely. You can spot the logical leap when the author goes from "music COULD BE a superstimulus for speech" to "music IS a superstimulus for speech" with absolutely no evidence or argument in between.

bazeblackwood 5y ago

> In particular, people never musicalize conversational speech. An incredibly wrongheaded assertion made without a lick of evidence.

tpoacher 5y ago

Counterexample: "This was a triumph. I'm making a note here, huge success. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction."