[HN Gopher] Dissonance - A Journey Through Musical Possibility S...
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Dissonance - A Journey Through Musical Possibility Space
Author : Nitrolo
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-12-02 11:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aatishb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aatishb.com)
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Music scientist Phillip Dorrell [0] has argued for the existence
| of currently hypothetical "strong music," a class of musical
| stimuli presumably discoverable by strong AI.
|
| The idea makes sense if you accept the concept of "intelligence
| explosion." 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 and optimization
| process that can more efficiently explore remote, undiscovered
| regions of music-space, we get a "music explosion."
|
| 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?
|
| 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 "supernormal stimuli":
| https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/
|
| [0] https://whatismusic.info/
| wrp wrote:
| Humans have been experimenting with the production of rhythmic
| sounds for aesthetic effect for millennia. Considering the
| extensive search through possibility space that this
| represents, I'm skeptical that a machine aided search could
| discover new local optima with a significantly greater
| aesthetic effect.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Human were also searching the space of Go moves for
| centuries, but AI completely blew us away.
|
| It turns out that some search spaces are far richer than we
| imagine.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| ```My name is Philip Dorrell. I currently work as a software
| development contractor. Although my only formal qualification
| is a B.Sc (mathematics) from the University of Waikato, New
| Zealand, I have always had an interest in the fields of
| science, mathematics, and various other fields not commonly
| thought of as being scientific or mathematical, but I prefer to
| approach them that way anyway.
|
| My current email address can be found at
| http://thinkinghard.com/email.html.
|
| I have a personal website at http://thinkinghard.com/, which
| contains articles on various subjects and also some items of
| software I have written.```
|
| I'm not sure I would call the author a music scientist given a
| lack of formal grounding or experience in music theory,
| composition, and performance. This kind of conjecture is
| completely devoid of the context of the history of music which
| in many ways is the history of language and art. What makes art
| pleasing to consume is highly contextual and not really
| something that can be reduced to context free grammar.
| bambax wrote:
| This assumes music's value and power are absolute and
| independent of the listener's experience. But most evidence
| points to the opposite.
|
| For one, music is culturally dependent and music from some
| regions of the world sound bad to people from other regions.
| Secondly, music becomes more enjoyable the more you listen to
| it. Yes, people certainly replay the songs they like, but
| _replaying them makes them like them more_ ; it's a positive
| loop that that feeds itself. And also, emotions derived from
| music use many other pieces of non-musical information:
| connection with the artist / ideas expressed in the piece /
| personal memories / etc.
|
| All of this makes it quite unlikely there is some absolute
| sound yet to be discovered in the musical universe that would
| wow anyone on the first hearing.
| hipshaker wrote:
| We have had "hit factories" for quite some time now,
| suggesting at least there is some kind of musical output that
| helps the process of wow-ness upon first listen.
|
| Sure, that formula does not always work on the moving targets
| of changing times and tastes, but i would argue that we
| actually do have a somewhat defined framework of that
| absolute sound (which has been around for some decades now).
| It's calles pop music, now a genre unto itself. Yeah, you may
| not WOW every living human on earth every time with great
| accuracy, but we have McDonalized music enough to small-wow
| millions at a time on a first listen basis, just by virtue of
| being made using quite narrow musical frameworks using rythm,
| scales, chord progressions, arrangement etc
| ArmandTanzarian wrote:
| If one is closed minded to learning math or the importance
| thereof, mathematics will be difficult. Similarly, if you see
| no value in exploring the world's cultural output, those
| explorations should prove quite difficult.
|
| I do agree with your conclusion however, as it is unlikely
| that some "perfect sound" exists. If it did, we would not
| have made so much music.
| ryanf wrote:
| This is interesting but I wish it included some information about
| the definition of "dissonance" being used. Of course xenharmonic
| stuff sometimes sounds out of tune just because it's unfamiliar,
| but also there's a temptation to go too far the other direction
| and assume that something must be exploring profound new harmonic
| space just because it sounds bad.
| superpope99 wrote:
| This is incredible! I've wanted to build something like this for
| a while.
|
| I sing in a barbershop quartet with 4 engineers, and we are
| constantly trying to tweak our tunings to optimise consonance of
| the chords we're singing. It can lead to interesting occurrences
| where you have to tune 2 consecutive notes differently despite
| the fact they are _on paper_ the same note.
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