What is Music? Blog

When engaged in spoken conversation, certain processes in the listener's brain are specially activated. When listening to music, those same processes are fully de-activated.

What Are Emotions? 27 June, 2020

I define emotions as biologically relevant abstract perceptions, and I attempt to relate this definition to my previous efforts to determine the "meaning" of music.

Why Does Music Trigger Maladaptive Daydreaming? 14 June, 2020

A theory about how music triggers maladaptive daydreaming, based on my theory that music is a superstimulus for the perception of non-spontaneous speech.

Music Is Not A Positive Superstimulus – It's A Negative Superstimulus 4 June, 2020

Music is a superstimulus for speech.

But it is not a positive superstimulus. It is a negative superstimulus, which causes at least one processing step in the normal processing of conversational speech to be completely suppressed.

This suppression, indirectly, results in the apparent positive effects of music on the listener's brain.

How To Deep Learn Music: Two Suggestions 3 June, 2020

Two suggestions for how to deep learn music better:

1. Solve an easier problem, with more limited scope: select a single backing track, and create a dataset of improvisations against that backing track.

2. Start with a hypothesis about what music is, or might be, and use that to drive the deep learning strategy.

Music Is A Superstimulus For The Perception Of Non-Spontaneous Non-Conversational Speech 2 June, 2020

Music is a superstimulus for the perception that a speaker's utterance lacks conversational value, and therefore the listener should not bother making any immediate effort to evaluate the truth value of that utterance.

The effect of music on a listener is to interrupt the normal sequence of information processing steps that apply to conversational speech.

This interruption leaves the listener's brain in an intermediate state, where the meaning of an utterance is determined, and the hypothetical emotional significance of the utterance is determined, but the listener has made no attempt to determine their beliefs about the truth value of the utterance.

The False Allure Of The Simple Verbal Definition 3 March, 2020

To ask the question 'What is the definition of "music"?' is to presume that an answer can be given. This is a mistake. Not because an answer can never be given, but because our ignorance of the nature of music is so total that we cannot currently give an answer.

Towards A Working Definition Of "Music" 29 February, 2020

Many search for a definition of "music" which is verbal, complete and objective.
But what we actually need to work with, right now, is a definition that is subjective, egocentric, and by example.

The Eternal Honeymoons Theory Of Fast Cutting Music Videos 27 February, 2020

In which I suggest a possible explanation of the emotional effect of fast cutting in music videos.
The viewer's initial emotional response to a shot in a music video is very generic, and generic emotion "works" better with music than more specific emotion.
This initial "honeymoon period" doesn't usually last more than about two seconds.
If every shot cuts to the next shot before this period expires, then the "honeymoons" can be made to last for the full length of the video.

Hypothesis: Music Motivates Constancy Of Emotional State 19 February, 2020

I propose that the primary effect of music on emotion is to motivate the listener to maintain a fixed unchanging emotional state, for the duration of the tune (or at least for a substantial portion of that duration).

A Hypothesis About Two Perceptual Systems 21 January, 2020

The Dual Perception System Hypothesis: The perception of music depends on two distinct perceptual systems – an immediate but imprecise perceptual system and a slow but precise perceptual system.
Music generates feelings when the precise system perceives a change, and the imprecise system does not "understand" why the change occurred.

The "World" Hypothesis 15 January, 2020

There are things that happen in the world, and then there are changes that happen to the world itself. Dreams are all about responding to hypothetical things that could happen in the world, and music is more about responding to hypothetical changes to the world.
I propose that every item of music is perceived as a separate world, and this explains how it is that music can give rise to strong feelings of "world change".