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[silverspawn]

of course it's also what someone on level 4 would say if levels 5+ were misguided

[silverspawn]

so what's wrong with 5 and 6? If it can be articulated.

[silverspawn]

Listening to harry potter #3. I used to listen to the books all the time as a kid. Heard them all so many times.

But now, ugh the plot is so absurdly convoluted. I get that that's not a good critique though, it's a children's book. Children don't care about convoluted plots, as evidence by e.g. me. But still, I would never tolerate a tenth of that much implausibility in my writing.

in hpmor, the whole thing is just a crazy conspiracy, and in fact black is a bad guy.

[Awaclus]

so what's wrong with 5 and 6? If it can be articulated.

Well, stage 5 just seems like a glorified regression to stage 2 — although you now technically have a justification for your takes, it is an ex post facto one which makes it all but worthless, and slavishly applying that model to new things can easily result in outcomes that are actually worse than just going with your gut feel on a case-by-case basis. I completely fail to see why stage 6 is even relevant.

I believe I am on a stage that's an improvement over 4, which is the realization that the quality of art is primarily neither objective nor subjective, but cultural. It is practically impossible for one person to ever have the right judgment on every work of art, because it is not something you can decide based on your own opinion alone, nor is it something that you can algorithmically derive from the features that the work objectively has, but a consensus amongst a group of people who are all very familiar with the art style in question is generally a pretty decent approximation of the right judgment. You could say that my job as a music producer is mainly to be so familiar with all the art styles that I work with that I can consistently make judgments in at least the right general direction just by myself.

[silverspawn]

so what's wrong with 5 and 6? If it can be articulated.

Well, stage 5 just seems like a glorified regression to stage 2 — although you now technically have a justification for your takes, it is an ex post facto one which makes it all but worthless, and slavishly applying that model to new things can easily result in outcomes that are actually worse than just going with your gut feel on a case-by-case basis. I completely fail to see why stage 6 is even relevant.

But the insight from #5 is true. There is a difference between emotional reactions to something that are, e.g., likely to apply to other people who are similar to you, and ones that aren't, and something like this is probably correlated with feelings in stage 2. They track something, you just have to understand what. It's a mistake by #3 and to throw them out.

Like, say you listen to one band and think they're simplistic and boring, and you listen to another band and think their music has lots going on but it doesn't speak to you. This is the kind of thing where #2 would say the first is bad and second "not for me". Calling the first bad is meaningless because bad is meaningless, but the difference does correspond to objective properties of the music, they're just hard to describe. The safest measurable thing is "probability that various other people would agree with me".

[silverspawn]

So it is in some sense going back to #2, but that's a good thing

[Awaclus]

But the insight from #5 is true. There is a difference between emotional reactions to something that are, e.g., likely to apply to other people who are similar to you, and ones that aren't, and something like this is probably correlated with feelings in stage 2. They track something, you just have to understand what. It's a mistake by #3 and to throw them out.

Like, say you listen to one band and think they're simplistic and boring, and you listen to another band and think their music has lots going on but it doesn't speak to you. This is the kind of thing where #2 would say the first is bad and second "not for me". Calling the first bad is meaningless because bad is meaningless, but the difference does correspond to objective properties of the music, they're just hard to describe. The safest measurable thing is "probability that various other people would agree with me".

The problem with this is that there are songs like Bleed by Meshuggah, that can simultaneously be widely recognized as one of the greatest songs in the history of genre by the fans of the genre, and still sound simplistic and boring to someone who never listens to music like that. And Bleed is not even a super extreme example: we're still talking about people from the same culture, and the person who finds it simplistic and boring probably enjoys some other kind of music whose cultural background has diverged from modern metal not more than a few decades ago. Of course when you consider things on the global scale with all the hunter-gatherer tribes etc, you're going to find even larger discrepancies between the perceptions of different people. It's a mistake when you're doing it in stage 2, and it's a mistake to regress back to it when you've already been at stage 4.

[silverspawn]

I don't understand why you think that makes the statement false. If I can predict what other people will say with better than chance accuracy, then there is a property of the music. That's already game over. The fact that there are examples where people would go wrong, or that you may be prone to make mistakes when estimating what someone from a different culture things, could both point to the fact that it's really difficult to describe what the thing is, but that has no bearing on the philosophical point.

[silverspawn]

I feel like what you're concerned about is people being poorly calibrated wrt to how much things will generalize, which would consider an independent question

[silverspawn]

Also, I think I'd personally be extremely careful with predictions about what others will think.

But I would predict something like, if you throw some fancy math to measure the degree of harmony vs. disharmony in music, then music will skew heavily toward the former across almost every culture. Disharmony is of course used stylistically in music all the time, but it's exceedingly rare to see more disharmony than harmony.

And harmony is definitely a precise mathematical quantity.

[silverspawn]

Unrelated:

You can only be alive. You have died endless times, but have never been killed for good. Your existence is logically entailed, necessary, and inevitable.

[Awaclus]

I don't understand why you think that makes the statement false. If I can predict what other people will say with better than chance accuracy, then there is a property of the music. That's already game over. The fact that there are examples where people would go wrong, or that you may be prone to make mistakes when estimating what someone from a different culture things, could both point to the fact that it's really difficult to describe what the thing is, but that has no bearing on the philosophical point.

You can also predict how other people will react to you saying certain words with better than chance accuracy, but that is a property of the mappings between sequences of phonemes and meanings in the brains of people who speak that language, not a property of the sequences of phonemes themselves. To someone who doesn't understand the language, the sequence of phonemes is probably not meaningful at all.

Also, I think I'd personally be extremely careful with predictions about what others will think.

But I would predict something like, if you throw some fancy math to measure the degree of harmony vs. disharmony in music, then music will skew heavily toward the former across almost every culture. Disharmony is of course used stylistically in music all the time, but it's exceedingly rare to see more disharmony than harmony.

And harmony is definitely a precise mathematical quantity.

Well, as I know from reading the news, some cultures do not have a particular preference towards harmony in music. Technically, that includes practically all cultures where the 12-tone equal temperament tuning system (i.e. the only one that's ever used in western music aside from a few exceptions like bugle calls) plays a major role, since it is kind of noticeably out of tune compared to the precise mathematical ratios.

[silverspawn]

Well, as I know from reading the news, some cultures do not have a particular preference towards harmony in music. Technically, that includes practically all cultures where the 12-tone equal temperament tuning system (i.e. the only one that's ever used in western music aside from a few exceptions like bugle calls) plays a major role, since it is kind of noticeably out of tune compared to the precise mathematical ratios.

I don't believe this at all. Articles are wrong all the time. I can't even really update on this because there are so many people who want to believe that everything is cultural that the existence of articles like this seem inevitable, and the way this is written doesn't inspire any confidence. It sounds to me like someone wanted to show that everything is cultural, so they found one tribe where the data bears that out, but of course, as soon as you optimize for getting extreme results, the results lose their meaning. And I said "almost every culture". I think there's an innate pleasantness to harmony, and there are cultural forces, which I think can go in any direction. I would expect that there are some cultures with more disharmony in music. My model is compatible with the existence of that article and study.

Note also that the study itself tells a much more mixed story. Bolivia is also a different culture.

Technically, that includes practically all cultures where the 12-tone equal temperament tuning system (i.e. the only one that's ever used in western music aside from a few exceptions like bugle calls) plays a major role, since it is kind of noticeably out of tune compared to the precise mathematical ratios.

No it doesn't! It shows that a bunch of music doesn't have the highest harmony possible. I didn't say anything about highest harmony possible, I said more harmony than disharmony, which is super duper the case for at least all of the piano music I've played and heard.

[silverspawn]

That last post was supposed to include this screen shot

[silverspawn]

The way you should go about collecting data on innate preference is by trying to take out the cultural variable and see what kinds of sounds babies prefer. Or even animals would be interesting.

[silverspawn]

You can also predict how other people will react to you saying certain words with better than chance accuracy, but that is a property of the mappings between sequences of phonemes and meanings in the brains of people who speak that language, not a property of the sequences of phonemes themselves. To someone who doesn't understand the language, the sequence of phonemes is probably not meaningful at all.

I do consider that a property of the phonemes! Properties are allowed to be of the form "these humans will have that reaction". It doesn't need to be "all humans have that reaction".

Which is why the other conversation isn't even really relevant (though I care about it for different reasons). Like, even if there were an equal number of cultures who prefer disharmony to harmony, harmony would still be a property of the music. The stage5/6 description doesn't say anything about preferences being universal. If all you can say is "this music has property X, and that group of humans will have a positive reaction to music with property X", that's totally compatible with stage 5.

[silverspawn]

The way you should go about collecting data on innate preference is by trying to take out the cultural variable and see what kinds of sounds babies prefer. Or even animals would be interesting.

Newborn infants' auditory system is sensitive to Western music chord categories

Neural encoding of abstract rules in the audition of newborn infants has been recently demonstrated in several studies using event-related potentials (ERPs). In the present study the neural encoding of Western music chords was investigated in newborn infants. Using ERPs, we examined whether the categorizations of major vs. minor and consonance vs. dissonance are present at the level of the change-related mismatch response (MMR). Using an oddball paradigm, root minor, dissonant and inverted major chords were presented in a context of consonant root major chords. The chords were transposed to several different frequency levels, so that the deviant chords did not include a physically deviant frequency that could result in an MMR without categorization. The results show that the newborn infants were sensitive to both dissonant and minor chords but not to inverted major chords in the context of consonant root major chords. While the dissonant chords elicited a large positive MMR, the minor chords elicited a negative MMR. This indicates that the two categories were processed differently. The results suggest newborn infants are sensitive to Western music categorizations, which is consistent with the authors' previous studies in adults and school-aged children.

[Awaclus]

No it doesn't! It shows that a bunch of music doesn't have the highest harmony possible. I didn't say anything about highest harmony possible, I said more harmony than disharmony, which is super duper the case for at least all of the piano music I've played and heard.

The most dissonant interval in just intonation (the augmented fourth) has a ratio of 729:512. In comparison, the most consonant interval in equal temperament (the perfect fifth) has a ratio of 2^7/12:1, which is not even a rational number. All the piano music you've played and heard is mathematically extremely disharmonious.

The way you should go about collecting data on innate preference is by trying to take out the cultural variable and see what kinds of sounds babies prefer. Or even animals would be interesting.

Newborn infants' auditory system is sensitive to Western music chord categories

Neural encoding of abstract rules in the audition of newborn infants has been recently demonstrated in several studies using event-related potentials (ERPs). In the present study the neural encoding of Western music chords was investigated in newborn infants. Using ERPs, we examined whether the categorizations of major vs. minor and consonance vs. dissonance are present at the level of the change-related mismatch response (MMR). Using an oddball paradigm, root minor, dissonant and inverted major chords were presented in a context of consonant root major chords. The chords were transposed to several different frequency levels, so that the deviant chords did not include a physically deviant frequency that could result in an MMR without categorization. The results show that the newborn infants were sensitive to both dissonant and minor chords but not to inverted major chords in the context of consonant root major chords. While the dissonant chords elicited a large positive MMR, the minor chords elicited a negative MMR. This indicates that the two categories were processed differently. The results suggest newborn infants are sensitive to Western music categorizations, which is consistent with the authors' previous studies in adults and school-aged children.

The problem is that pregnant people listen to music and fetuses hear it, so the newborn infants, who were all born in Finland, would have already been somewhat familiar with western music chord categories.

[Awaclus]

I do consider that a property of the phonemes! Properties are allowed to be of the form "these humans will have that reaction". It doesn't need to be "all humans have that reaction".

Why would it be a property of the phonemes? It's clearly a property of the humans.

[silverspawn]

I do consider that a property of the phonemes! Properties are allowed to be of the form "these humans will have that reaction". It doesn't need to be "all humans have that reaction".

Why would it be a property of the phonemes? It's clearly a property of the humans.

It's both. I define a property as any kind of statement about that thing. If P is a string phenomes and f describes how I would react to hearing it, then f(P) = {something} is a property of P. It's also a property of f.

[silverspawn]

The most dissonant interval in just intonation (the augmented fourth) has a ratio of 729:512. In comparison, the most consonant interval in equal temperament (the perfect fifth) has a ratio of 2^7/12:1, which is not even a rational number. All the piano music you've played and heard is mathematically extremely disharmonious.

I don't know how harmony is measured, but there's no way a sensible measurement outputs this! Many people can't even hear the difference between a well-tempered piano and the precisely tempered one. (My understanding of the difference is that F sharp and G flat are the same on a well-tempered piano but actually ought to be two different things?) A major chord on a well-tempered piano sounds harmonic to me.

[silverspawn]

The problem is that pregnant people listen to music and fetuses hear it, so the newborn infants, who were all born in Finland, would have already been somewhat familiar with western music chord categories.

I grant that this is a possible issue, but do you actually believe that it accounts for the effect? (Not that you even have to buy that the effect is real based on a single study that I haven't looked into.)

[silverspawn]

The most dissonant interval in just intonation (the augmented fourth) has a ratio of 729:512. In comparison, the most consonant interval in equal temperament (the perfect fifth) has a ratio of 2^7/12:1, which is not even a rational number. All the piano music you've played and heard is mathematically extremely disharmonious.

I don't know how harmony is measured, but there's no way a sensible measurement outputs this! Many people can't even hear the difference between a well-tempered piano and the precisely tempered one. (My understanding of the difference is that F sharp and G flat are the same on a well-tempered piano but actually ought to be two different things?) A major chord on a well-tempered piano sounds harmonic to me.

I'm guessing that you have to measure the distance to the next harmonic chord, rather than the literal representation as a rational. I mean, 0.5+0.00000000001e is not a rational number, but extremely close to 1/2. But of course I have no idea what I'm talking about.

[Awaclus]

The most dissonant interval in just intonation (the augmented fourth) has a ratio of 729:512. In comparison, the most consonant interval in equal temperament (the perfect fifth) has a ratio of 2^7/12:1, which is not even a rational number. All the piano music you've played and heard is mathematically extremely disharmonious.

I don't know how harmony is measured, but there's no way a sensible measurement outputs this! Many people can't even hear the difference between a well-tempered piano and the precisely tempered one. (My understanding of the difference is that F sharp and G flat are the same on a well-tempered piano but actually ought to be two different things?) A major chord on a well-tempered piano sounds harmonic to me.

F sharp and G flat are the same pitch in equal temperament, but the way in which they differ is that they appear in different contexts; a typical western scale with 7 notes has a note per letter in ascending order and that determines which letters are used for the sharps/flats. In some cases, musicians who are able to do so play the notes at slightly different pitches depending on what roles they have in the scale, e.g. a leading tone is sometimes played a bit too sharp to create even more tension, but that's a thing they do based on a gut feel, not a specific set-in-stone pitch.

It's true that the ~2 cent difference between 2^7/12:1 and 3:2 isn't really audible to most people, but some of these other differences certainly are. Even 10 cents is a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Comparison_with_just_intonation

[Awaclus]

The problem is that pregnant people listen to music and fetuses hear it, so the newborn infants, who were all born in Finland, would have already been somewhat familiar with western music chord categories.

I grant that this is a possible issue, but do you actually believe that it accounts for the effect? (Not that you even have to buy that the effect is real based on a single study that I haven't looked into.)

I buy the effect is real, nowadays I have a very strong commitment to believing studies because otherwise it would be too easy to disregard any evidence that challenges my worldview. (It gets complicated when different studies come to mutually exclusive conclusions, but it is fine for things to get complicated when that happens anyway.)

But yeah, I pretty much actually believe that it accounts for the effect. I'm not entirely sure how much of what I know about the effects of music on fetuses is based on solid science and how much of it is on flimsier grounds, but I am under the impression that e.g. listening to a lot of music while pregnant can help your child develop perfect pitch, listening to more complex music helps with their musical as well as overall intellectual development, and experiencing strong positive emotions when listening to certain kinds of music can create associations between that type of music and those emotions in your fetus. Also, apparently the reason why bass frequencies sound so good to people is that they're relatively louder while you're in the womb. I would very much expect newborn babies to already have similar musical tastes to their parents.