Musical repetition has become a repeating theme of this blog. Seems appropriate, right? This post looks at a book by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, called On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind. It investigates the reasons why we love repetition in music. You can also read long excerpts at Aeon Magazine.
Here’s the nub of Margulis’ argument:
The simple act of repetition can serve as a quasi-magical agent of musicalisation. Instead of asking: ‘What is music?’ we might have an easier time asking: ‘What do we hear as music?’ And a remarkably large part of the answer appears to be: ‘I know it when I hear it again.’
Margulis’ writing is the first place I’ve encountered the idea that repetition is music’s most basic defining quality. I think she’s right.
Cultures all over the world make repetitive music. The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois counts repetitiveness among the few musical universals known to characterise music the world over. Hit songs on American radio often feature a chorus that plays several times, and people listen to these already repetitive songs many times. The musicologist David Huron at Ohio State University estimates that, during more than 90 per cent of the time spent listening to music, people are actually hearing passages that they’ve listened to before. The play counter in iTunes reveals just how frequently we listen to our favourite tracks. And if that’s not enough, tunes that get stuck in our heads seem to loop again and again. In short, repetition is a startlingly prevalent feature of music, real and imagined.
Not only is repetition extraordinarily prevalent, but you can make non-musical sounds musical just by repeating them.
The psychologist Diana Deutsch, at the University of California, San Diego, discovered a particularly powerful example – the speech-to-song illusion. The illusion begins with an ordinary spoken utterance, the sentence ‘The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible.’ Next, one part of this utterance – just a few words – is looped several times. Finally, the original recording is represented in its entirety, as a spoken utterance. When the listener reaches the phrase that was looped, it seems as if the speaker has broken into song, Disney-style.
The speech-to-sound illusion, discovered by Diana Deutsch, UC San Diego. To experience the illusion, play the two recordings in sequence.
Credit: Diana Deutsch
Like Brian Eno says: “Repetition is a form of change.”
The speech-to-song illusion reveals that the exact same sequence of sounds can seem either like speech or like music, depending only on whether it has been repeated. Repetition can actually shift your perceptual circuitry such that the segment of sound is heard as music: not thought about as similar to music, or contemplated in reference to music, but actually experienced as if the words were being sung.
The speech-to-song illusion suggests something about the very nature of music: that it’s a quality not of the sounds themselves, but of a particular method our brain uses to attend to sounds.
The ‘musicalisation’ shifts your attention from the meaning of the words to the contour of the passage (the patterns of high and low pitches) and its rhythms (the patterns of short and long durations), and even invites you to hum or tap along with it. In fact, part of what it means to listen to something musically is to participate imaginatively.
That is as good a definition of music as I’ve ever come across.
Now here’s a philosophical question:
Can music exist without repetition? Well, music is not a natural object and composers are free to flout any tendency that it seems to exhibit. Indeed, over the past century, a number of composers expressly began to avoid repetitiveness in their work.
It should be no mystery that such music is heard by most people (including me) as uniformly awful.
In a recent study at the Music Cognition lab, we played people samples of this sort of music, written by such renowned 20th-century composers as Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter. Unbeknownst to the participants, some of these samples had been digitally altered. Segments of these excerpts, chosen only for convenience and not for aesthetic effect, had been extracted and reinserted. These altered excerpts differed from the original excerpts only in that they featured repetition.
The altered excerpts should have been fairly cringeworthy; after all, the originals were written by some of the most celebrated composers of recent times, and the altered versions were spliced together without regard to aesthetic effect. But listeners in the study consistently rated the altered excerpts as more enjoyable, more interesting, and – most tellingly – more likely to have been composed by a human artist rather than randomly generated by a computer.
There’s so much here. I have never understood the prestige attached to Berio and Carter. I find their music to be plenty cringeworthy to begin with. I’m not at all surprised that adding some repetition to it actually makes it more tolerable.
The central message of Margulis’ research is that repetition imbues sounds with meaning.
Repetition serves as a handprint of human intent. A phrase that might have sounded arbitrary the first time might come to sound purposefully shaped and communicative the second.
That phrase, “a handprint of human intent,” is a really good one. And how, exactly, does repetition imbue sounds with meaning?
Ask an indulgent friend to pick a word – lollipop, for example – and keep saying it to you for a couple minutes. You will gradually experience a curious detachment between the sounds and their meaning. This is the semantic satiation effect, documented more than 100 years ago. As the word’s meaning becomes less and less accessible, aspects of the sound become oddly salient – idiosyncrasies of pronunciation, the repetition of the letter l, the abrupt end of the last syllable, for example. The simple act of repetition makes a new way of listening possible, a more direct confrontation with the sensory attributes of the word itself.
This is another terrific potential definition of music: “Confrontation with the sensory attributes of sound.”
Anthropologists might feel that they are on familiar ground here, because it is now understood that rituals – by which I mean stereotyped sequences of actions, such as the ceremonial washing of a bowl – also harness the power of repetition to concentrate the mind on immediate sensory details rather than broader practicalities. In the case of the bowl-washing, for example, the repetition makes it clear that the washing gestures aren’t meant merely to serve a practical end, such as making the bowl clean, but should rather serve as a locus of attention in themselves.
It’s no coincidence that music and ritual work together so closely all over the world.
[T]he repetition of gestures makes it harder and harder to resist imaginatively modelling them, feeling how it might be to move your own hand in the same way. This is precisely the way that repetition in music works to make the nuanced, expressive elements of the sound increasingly available, and to make a participatory tendency – a tendency to move or sing along – more irresistible.
Even involuntary repetition, quite against our own musical preferences, is powerful. This is why music that we hate but that we’ve heard again and again can sometimes engage us unwillingly; why we can find ourselves on the bus enthusiastically grooving along until we realise that we’re actually listening to We Built This City by Starship.
And when we do want bits of speech to be tightly bound in this way – if we’re memorising a list of the presidents of the United States, for example – we might set it to music, and we might repeat it.
We’ve all unconsciously composed little melodies to help ourselves memorize something. You used to see it with phone numbers, back when people had to know phone numbers. In preliterate societies, music is the best method for storing and conveying complex stories and information.
Margulis’ ideas are almost flawless, but I need to dispute one of her assertions:
It’s also worth pointing out that there are many aspects of music not illuminated by repetition. It might be possible to transform speech into song, but a single bowed note on a violin can also sound unambiguously musical without any special assistance.
As a matter of fact, the musical nature of a single bowed note on a violin is further proof of the intrinsically repetitive nature of musical sound. Any pitched sound is really just a very fast rhythm. If you play a series of clicks and speed it up gradually, at around twenty clicks per second, you stop hearing them as individual events. Instead, you experience a single stream of clicks, a phenomenon known as “event fusion.” If you speed up the click stream a little more, you begin to hear a distinct pitch. Perceptually speaking, “pitch” is just our sensation of regular rhythms whose tempos are faster than the threshold for event fusion. At 440 clicks per second, your click stream is a concert A. Your voice produces pitched sounds by rhythmically flapping (“clicking”) your vocal folds. Here’s a video of what this looks like; be warned that it is not for the squeamish.
Another statement of Margulis’ that I want to correct:
Repetition can’t explain why a minor chord sounds dark or a diminished chord sounds sinister.
This is actually where the explanatory power of rhythm shines brightest. If a single pitch is a very fast rhythm, then a chord is a very fast polyrhythm. A perfect fifth is a three against two polyrhythm, also known as hemiola. The ratios of beats comprising minor and diminished chords are more complex and difficult to parse, which in our culture we associate with darkness or evil.
Margulis is on firmer ground when she discusses the way that rhythm changes our passive hearing into active listening. Emphasis is mine:
[Repetition] captures sequencing circuitry that makes music feel like something you do rather than something you perceive. This sense of identification we have with music, of listening with it rather than to it, so definitional to what we think about as music, also owes a lot to repeated exposure.
Marc Sabatella says that we are all musicians. Some of us are listening musicians, and some are performing musicians. Repetition turns us all into listening musicians.
The stunning prevalence of repetition in music all over the world is no accident. Music didn’t acquire the property of repetitiveness because it’s less sophisticated than speech, and the 347 times that iTunes says you have listened to your favourite album isn’t evidence of some pathological compulsion – it’s just a crucial part of how music works its magic. Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as musical. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen. That experience of being played by the music is what creates a sense of shared subjectivity with the sound, and – when we unplug our earbuds, anyway – with each other, a transcendent connection that lasts at least as long as a favourite song.
The art of sample-based hip-hop relies on beatmakers’ ability to find fragments within the linear stream of recorded music and bend them into unexpected loops.
Digital audio makes it possible for us to effortlessly and endlessly repeat segments of music ranging in length from short phrases to entire artists’ catalogs. Not only do we love to listen to repetitive songs, we love to do so repeatedly. In Capturing Sound, Mark Katz points out that recording makes it possible to have precisely repeated listening experiences for the first time in history.
Live performances are unique, while recordings are repeatable… [A]ny orchestra can play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony many times; each performance, however, will necessarily be different.
Such repeated listening can’t help but change our relationship to the art form of music in general.
For listeners, repetition raises expectations. This is true in live performance; once we’ve heard Beethoven’s Fifth in concert, we assume it will start with the same famous four notes the next time we hear it. But with recordings, we can also come to expect features that are unique to a particular performance—that a certain note will be out of tune, say. With sufficient repetition, listeners may normalize interpretive features of a performance or even mistakes, regarding them as integral not only to the performance but to the music. In other words, listeners may come to think of an interpretation as the work itself.
The repeatability of recorded sound has affected listeners’ expectations on a much broader scope as well. When the phonograph was invented, the goal for any recording was to simulate a live performance, to approach reality as closely as possible. Over the decades, expectations have changed. For many—perhaps most—listeners, music is now primarily a technologically mediated experience. Concerts must therefore live up to recordings. Given that live music had for millennia been the only type of music, it is amazing to see how quickly it has been supplanted as model and ideal.
The possibilities of repeated listening to recordings also has profound implications for music education. Cognitive scientists use the word “rehearsal” to describe the process by which the brain learns through repeated exposure to the same stimulus. As they like to say, neurons that fire together wire together. Repetitive music builds rehearsal in, making it more accessible and inclusive. Kirt Saville explores how looping can serve the music teacher in his paper, Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool.
I can’t overstate the value of using loops of actual songs played by actual musicians, as opposed to metronomes or fake-sounding MIDI tracks. The metronome demoralizes students quickly, and convenient though MIDI is, it doesn’t convey feeling and nuance. Study of the genuine article, with its groove and feeling intact, is a vastly richer and more engaging experience. Also, listening to music loops creates a trance-like, meditative feeling, as fans of repetitive electronic dance music will attest. This meditative state is most conducive to flow, and turns repeated drilling into a pleasurable act.
I’ll close with a Prince quote I’ve already used here, and in many other places on this blog. It feels appropriate to repeat it:
There’s joy in repetition
There’s joy in repetition
There’s joy in repetition
There’s joy in repetition
There’s joy in repetition
There’s joy in repetition
Words to live by. Words to live by. Words to live by. Words to live by.
Update: there’s a lively discussion of this post happening on Synthtopia’s Facebook page.
Simple blues one chord stuff like some Howlin wolf and John lee hooker songs are hypnotic and create a landscape that takes you to a magical place,and when done you feel like you`ve been there.It`s not pop ! or westernized.Then blues mixed with western chords and still put minor lines over major chords.And for those who look at it as repetition, etc.miss the shamanistic quality within. that’s why “the men don`t know but the little girls understand”
Repetition is an important part of music. But the amount of repetition is a critical factor. A lot of classical fans don’t like popular music because it sounds too repetitive.
Repeating a 4/4 beats sounds nice to many people but repeating a 7/8 beat doesn’t. And many people don’t like a part which keeps on repeating. So there’s a kind of “magic” parameter. In my opinion it should always be a matter of tension and release. There should always be a thing to trick the mind. That’s why repetition on digital devices often bores the heck out of you when it is lacking these small randomisations. If you apply randomness to sound often it become way more interesting.
Hearing melodies in things is a matter of “does it fit our western scale?”. Same as for harmonies. Things won’t get better on repetition if they are not melodic or not harmonic. And they can even become super annoying because of repetitions.
The set of rules we use in music is what makes it music. We have strict definitions for rhythm, melody and harmony. Organising noise agains a set of rules is what we call music in my opinion. The term music is being judgemental. We hold that term against our set of rules. Noise on repeat is simply what it is, noise on repeat. Organising this noise in a beautiful way is what makes it music. So key is the organisation, not the repetition. Music is not simple a matter of repeating noise. It is the way in which the noise was organised which makes the music.
The amount of repetition that people like will vary, but it’s a difference of degree, not kind. Mozart is almost as repetitive as any pop song, there are just more repetitive chunks strung together.
The 4/4 versus 7/8 thing is culturally determined. There are plenty of people in this world who can get down to 7/8, especially in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India. Tension and release is certainly a widely-used device in a lot of the world’s music, but it’s hardly a universal.
It is most certainly untrue that the definition of a melody is whether or not it fits into the western tuning system. If you listen to music in an exotic tuning system like seven-tone heptatonic, you might not enjoy it, but it’ll still register as music. Plenty of people do like that music, and westerners can learn to as well. Also, blues is a hugely popular western genre that routinely departs from western tuning.
I agree with you that music is defined by organization. But there is no way to organize sounds in time without repetition of some kind.
Yes, that’s what I meant to say. Music is defined by organisation. Repetition is an important part of it but not that important. It’s not that as soon as well start to repeat any kind of noise we get music. Or at least not to my ears. But I agree that a lot of people won’t agree. I hear much music which sounds boring to me. Or too much as noise.
The difference between random noise and organised noise is maybe small. But for me it’s not. I want music which has a huge impact on me. I guess these days most people simply want something that makes them wanna dance. Just a beat. Just a simple song. Not a deep emotion thing. And sure, that’s also music. Yeah very judgemental stuff I guess :)
“Once we’ve grasped the pattern, why don’t we get bored listening to repetitive music? The best answer I’ve found is in Matthew Butterfield’s paper, The Power of Anacrusis: Engendered Feeling in Groove-Based Musics. Butterfield argues that we don’t hear each repetition as an instance of mechanical reproduction. Instead, we experience the groove as a process, with each iteration creating suspense. We’re constantly asking ourselves: “Will this time through the pattern lead to another repetition, or will there be a break in the pattern?” Butterfield describes a groove as a present that is “continually being created anew.” Each repetition gains particularity from our memory of the immediate past and our expectations for the future.”
Does this work for quantized Drum patterns too?
Good question. I think the answer is a qualified yes. Quantized patterns are more predictable, of course, but the good ones are still sufficiently complex as to keep us a little off balance. If the pattern is rigidly quantized, that gives the rhythm a kind of airless and alienated quality, which is the point; people like feeling claustrophobic anxiety for some reason. I myself prefer beats that are less rigid, I’m more of a hip-hop guy than an EDM guy, but the same basic principles apply.
Many people who enjoy watching horror movies may get a kick out of it by somehow having their sense of reality challengingly stimulated by the unreality of the horror (I’m so not in that club). You mention symmetry. I think such persons feel the symmetry in the contrast.
No claustrophobic sensations on my part. I truly enjoy a wide range of rythmic-alities, though not just any of them at any time. My cognitive functioning varies widely, though in my most healthy times I can and do enjoy just about any style.
Then, again, my brain is rather loosely held together.
“Repetition defines music”
Ahhhh… maby for you; but certainly not for me.
Expression and inner expressive intent define real music.
(But maby repetition defines techno, and low forms of electronic music)
And what musical form does “expression and inner expressive intent” take? What kind of music is it that doesn’t use repetition? If it has any pitches, those are fast beats. If it has a metrical scheme of any kind, that’s repetition. The one quality that links Mozart, Coltrane and Ravi Shankar is repetition. Oh yeah, and “low” music too.
What an utterly terrible article. The author has decided that his opinions as to what makes good music are not opinions, but facts. Some of us despise repetitive music (even the last 3-1/2 minutes of Hey Jude).
I found Fela Kuti boring after about 10 seconds.
If you don’t like the Beatles or Fela Kuti, what do you like?
But maybe not, because if it did then how could you even perceive the music as abrasive in the first place? (So this turns the question into one of how music can be abrasive. At what level does an underlying repetition inherent to pitch fail to translate into a pleasant overall repetitiveness? Is the perception of repetition layered, does it operate on various scales, how continuous are they with each other? Hmm.)
Here’s a question:
Doesn’t this fundamental equivalence of pitch and repetition render a Berio/Carter-style agenda inherently absurd? (In a “distinction without a difference” kind of way.)
I would certainly agree that the Berio/Carter agenda is inherently absurd. The thing we’re responding to in music is scale-invariant self-similarity, and if we don’t hear enough of it at the microscale, we experience the music as abrasive. Not enough at the macroscale and we hear the music as confusing.
You probably make some good points here, but you lost me at this sentence:
“It should be no mystery that such music is (IMHO) uniformly godawful.”
I really have no respect for the wholesale dismissal of any entire art form. Fine if you don’t like it (most people don’t) but freely improvised music (which is usually, but not always, non-repetitive) is some of most urgent, exciting music on the planet.
I totally understand the importance of repetition in any music created to entertain large numbers of people. Advertising your ignorance of music that does *not* fit the mold of the music under discussion does not help make your case.
It’s hard to find completely free improvisation. In late Coltrane and Mingus, there’s almost always an implicit pulse or key center in there somewhere. Things do get to be genuinely free and structureless with Ornette Coleman, and it’s no mystery to me why his music mostly gets on my nerves, compared to the excitement I feel about Coltrane.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the visceral revulsion I experience when I hear twentieth century classical music. It isn’t just dislike. I don’t much enjoy opera, or death metal, or Celine Dion. But it’s still easy for me to recognize that there’s musicality at work, and I can easily imagine why people do enjoy them. With enough effort, I can even find little moments or ideas that I can get genuine pleasure from. My experience of Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez et al is different. I feel like I’m being punished for something, and I’m left wondering what I ever did to deserve it. I had to listen to and analyze quite a bit of twentieth century art music in grad school, and studied directly with some of the practitioners, Morton Subotnick prominent among them. I understand this stuff better than most non-specialists. And the more I learn, the deeper my revulsion gets. Subotnick is an especially interesting case. I like him personally, very much, and thought he was a wonderful teacher. But his music has not endeared itself to me after gaining deeper understanding of his underlying philosophy. Quite the opposite, actually.
I like plenty of fringe, challenging and unpopular music. I’m as sophisticated and open-minded a music listener as probably exists on this planet. And I basically think that willful incomprehensibility is not a good quality in music. I think the twentieth century was kind of a dead end for “art” music, at least until Steve Reich showed up. Maybe most people aren’t stupid; maybe we just dislike abrasive music because it isn’t that good.
What I hate is being emotionally and viscerally blackmailed into liking music I intellectually feel is below me–i.e. Neil Diamond, anything Country, or anything too bubblegummedly catchy. People kneejerkedly object to ritual, but life is one long groundhoggedly repetitive series of rituals; working, eating, hygiene, and sleeping. Religions reiterate rites and rubrics ad infinitum as well. Predictability is SAFE. But now and then, someone decides to climb some distant perilous mountain and they do it because it’s THERE. Choose nonredundancy because it’s the road less traveled–why care about wealth when you possess genius? Mozart died a pauper and nobody ever discusses Einstein financial portfolio.
How can you be blackmailed into liking something? Either you like it or you don’t. Also, what’s the harm in enjoying country music?
It’s that old-time Ionic tonality (sung to the tune of “It’s that Old Time Religion”) that keeps tripping our emotional switches like a movie that hammers home its homilies, rather than hints at its own humanity. Subtle it is not, but you can’t help but automatically react to that circular old I, IV, V saw. They say we already become conditioned to it in the womb. Excellent video about tonal norms on YouTube, by the way, it’s called “Twelve Tones” by Vihart. It certainly helped ME to think more chromatically. I was stuck in I, IV, V tonality for decades. Learning the modes, Dorian, Phrygian, etc. Also helped me escape the Ionian honey-trap.
The twelve tones aren’t the only way out. Listen to some blues music, there are unresolved tritones, microtones, mixture of major and minor and all kinds of other harmonic goodies without having to abandon the idea of a home base underneath it all. Or if you’re feeling boxed even by that, try some hip-hop — no top line melody, little or no triadic harmony, the whole pitch continuum at the rappers’ disposal. Liberating without being alienating. Plus you can dance to it. I love Vi Hart, but she’s a better math teacher than musician.
I DO tend to Overthink just about everything!
I also just want to say I’m not anti groove and I really do enjoy this article quite a bit. I in fact play in a groove based band which I won’t promote here since that’s kind of lame. I just think there is a taste and flavor for any occasion and I do sometimes love me some atonal music.
Please, promote away, let’s hear it.
Its a quiet, misunderstood, nerdy, and disciplined music. A lot like those professors who seem to love it so much. Schoenberg based his idea off of Beethoven’s late works. For example The Grosse Fugue runs through all the keys so quickly that there is no tonal center. He didn’t write something light and nice but something gnarled and hard to comprehend. “Atonal” music is often about dissatisfaction and deep sadness. Yes you’re right that it exists is due to academic grading. I don’t really have a problem with that as a music, that’s a problem with schools. The music comes from an initial feeling and its unfortunate that it thrives by being easy to grade. I relate since I am unhappy with our current society. The fear of global warming, the greed of corporations, and the corruption of politicians. I hear that dark brooding in the music of Berg, Webern, Carter, and so on. Its a sort of demented twisted blues. I listen to it when I’m feeling sad, tired, or angry. I find it soothing at those points.
Very interesting read. Where does musical symmetry fit into this? People consciously or otherwise enjoy regular structures in music as they do in nature and I’d say repetition is often the balancing device which achieves this…
Absolutely right. Repetition is just temporal symmetry, and symmetry is the name of the game.
I like Berio and Carter! There is repetition just much harder to find which is why it is jarring. That little snippet of opinion really turned me off to an otherwise outstanding blog. 12 tone music (aka atonal), simply has a different way of repeating tones. I guess its a more academic enjoyment since really to enjoy it you need to look at a score and figure out what is happening. There’s a reason why these composers wrote in the style for almost an entire century.
I stand by my contempt for the serialists. Not all repetition methods are equally valid. I like challenging and academic music fine, but I draw the line at totally impenetrable. If I need to read a score to figure out what the hell is going on, the composer is not doing their job. The reason this stuff has persisted in the music academy for so long seems to me to be more to do with the peer pressures and calcified traditions of institutions, not the actual music itself. But I’m open to being convinced. What is the pleasure you experience from Berio and Carter? What do they do for you emotionally? Is it about pleasure at all? I’ve had other people compare high modernism to jumping into a freezing cold lake or taking powerful psychedelic drugs. Is that what it is for you, or something else? Genuinely interested to learn.
Check out the track “fold4 wrap5” by autechre. It’s kind of a circular DEccelerando illusion track.
I had never heard this before and it is amazing. Eric, are you checking this out?
very cool! I also found this page, with an audio example and supercollider code:
http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/MusicTechnology/826
Beautiful and inspiring post!
On the one hand, I think about how periodicity is a fundamental property of things, and you can find cycles in phenomena at every time scale, electrons to galaxies. On the other hand, pitch perception is surely governed by a different mechanism in the brain than, say, recognizing that chorus again… right? So we might expect that perception at these different time scales (milliseconds vs. tens of seconds) would not work the same way, and so the way they deal with repetition will be different… right?
For example, the missing fundamental illusion in pitch: does “the same thing” happen for rhythms? hmm maybe it does actually…
and maybe you could even make a circular-pitch-illusion-like pattern for rhythms. this would be a beat that always sounds like it’s speeding up, but never does! it’s a “circular accelerando illusion”. woah. maybe we should try to make that…
Maybe all our brain’s pattern detectors work basically the same way- something like reinforcement of looping patterns. neuron A fires, triggering neuron B, which triggers neuron A, then B, and so on, at the particular rate (“rhythm”) built into that pair of cells. and there are whole banks of these loops with different lengths. so you’ve got actual temporal loops in your brain, and a particular one will get excited by a stimulus repeating at a certain rate. so music loop builds up excitation in a certain neural loop, which keeps going and “expecting” more repeats of the music…. (thanks to my friend Peter Cariani for showing me this idea)
also: lots of things in your essay remind me of bits from Minsky’s essay, which is fascinating (if problematic in places!), “music, mind and meaning.” I think he’s saying similar things in a different way. like this bit:
“Good music germinates from tiny seeds. How cautiously we handle novelty, sandwiching the new between repeated sections of familiar stuff! The clearest kind of change is near-identity, in thought just as in vision. Slight shifts in view may best reveal an object’s form or even show us whether it is there at all.”
https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/MusicMindMeaning.html
I love that Minsky essay. A big influence on my thinking.