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.
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.
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.
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.
I found this assertion confusing. Speech in say, English (just to narrow it down), is musical inherently. The pitch and rhythm of a speaking voice, especially how they change while an individual is speaking, is meaningful meta-information about what is being said, and how the speaker feels about it, or what they mean by what they say.
We _absolutely_ use the music of everyday speech to create emphasis, for example, and in many other ways. Actors use pitch and rhythm when speaking to convey emotions. It is often the musical content of speech that makes or breaks the performance. Mismatching speech melodies with the dialog sounds all wrong.
I dunno, 10 years or so ago I wrote a whole MA thesis on this exact subject. It's long enough ago (and I've not stayed in the field I was in) that I've long forgotten many of the sources, but there is plenty of stuff out there that deals with speech and music.
To veer off into pure opinion: I definitely think music gains some of its emotional impact by virtue of its relationship to speech, given that we can interpret so much from the music of speech itself, and if that kind of metadata is presented _independently_ of natural speech, there's often something pleasing or interesting about about that. We also are super good at listening for other meaningful sounds though, like things that might kill us.
My two cents is that music, like other art and things like sports or games, leverages senses, instincts, and skills that evolved initially for other purposes, and uses them recreationally, playfully. To varying degrees, humans seem to like stimulating and playing with their senses in different ways.
I'm not convinced that the attempt to explain it the way the author does is worthwhile. Parts of it ring true and parts of it (like the role of discerning truth and the claim that people don't musicalize their speech) I think are off track, and maybe also constrained by a far too limited perspective of what music is in the first place.
You're right, but you may want to consider that highly monotone communicators may not actually notice most of the non-literal signals that get passed in typical social situations.
Models be built from something, something related to the modeler's interpretation of their own interface into reality.
That said, it's nice that such a model was made; it's a nice reference / jumping off point. Someone more sensitive to their percepts and the nuances of life would be hard pressed to formalize any model at all; they'd be hard pressed to unfocus from the complexities and responsibilities of social life to do the abstract work of modeling.
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.
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.
This theory seems naive, simplistic and flat out wrong.
1) This hand waves away a key part conversations, the process of establishing sufficient shared meaning to pass information. This process is most obvious in its absence from comedic conversations where two characters talk past eachother (e.g. who's on first.)
4) The percieved "spontaneity" of a statement does not have any fixed relationship with the effort we put into verifying the truth of that statement. It's effects are minimal compared to our perception of the intent of the speaker in making the statement.
5) This is a mandatory part of conversations? I extremely rarely see people respond to statements is such manner.
Conversations are diverse and conversationalists follow many different models, sometimes even within a conversation.
As far as I can tell, the Author is so set on the "music is a super stimulus of speech" that they have post-hoc invented an unrealistic model to make their hypothesis work.
In reality, music, like most art, exploits a wide variety of perceptual and cognitive quirks while referencing a shared set of cultural experiences. Trying to boil this down to "music is a super stimulus of conversational speech" is simplistic and boring.
This is just bad pseudo-psychology from someone who wrote a whole "science" book on the topic without actually doing any actual science.
Wouldn't your hypothesis undermine research that suggests the important pieces of communication are non-verbal(7% words, 38% tone, 55% body language...roughly depending on which research you use).
Also, I don't see a way to actively separate information and emotion while someone is communicating to you while still being able to fully understand...that would just mean you are not paying attention to at least one of the signals...but maybe that IS what is happening when people pay more attention to body language and tone over the actual content.
We don't have good words for talking about this stuff (ironically), but I didn't intend to imply that the emotional aspect was less important than informational. Maybe "logical" would have been a better word for the latter. It's all information.
Perhaps a better way to think of the split is that some of the audio content needs to be processed deliberately and sequentially—it has grammatical structure, words that need to be decoded, semantics, etc. It requires processing from the part of our brain that needs to deliberately pay attention to things. It's like reading or doing math.
Meanwhile, some of it can be processed more intuitively. It's where we pick up tone and emotional intent. We will absorb that even if we don't deliberately focus on it—you can tell that someone is angry when they speak even if you don't know their language.
Of course, understanding both of those requires integrating them together. The lexical content of their speech might tell you why they feel a certain way or what they feel that way about.
But one way to look at music is that it's a sound artifact designed to deliberately convey "I'm almost all non-grammatical, it's OK to not focus on me."
> important pieces of communication are non-verbal
That can't possibly be true for actual information (in the Shannon sense).
When you say to someone "go to the grocery store and buy a soda", these words can't be just 7% of the total information. Or put another way, what exactly do you communicate in the other 93% (13 times more information)
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.
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.
The two outlooks can hardly be said to be mutually exclusive. You can absolutely cultivate both sides of yourself, learn to appreciate both logic and poetry. Doing so leaves you a much more well rounded person than either Spock or Bones.
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.
There's a stereotype that art is the domain of the anti-reductionist, but I don't think that's a historical constant. Would anyone say that mathematically-accurate linear perspective had no artistic merit when it was invented? How about techniques like the rule of thirds? What would you call abstract art, if not an attempt to reduce art to its true fundamentals?
I would say this "divide" in thought started a couple of centuries ago(at it was very noticeable in recorded history).Even among "type 1", let's take an example: math: you had the so-called fundamentalists that believed in power of measurements and the other who believed in the power of abstract,imaginary,etc.
This also applies to computing later (and still to this day) and pretty much everything else under the sun, including arts/liberal arts, for example: people who believed in the fundamental of beauty, complexity, hand-made craft, and some who would believe in the abstract notions, conveyed messages,etc.(you definitely see this throughout "modern art")
To me,making this distinction seems like the wrong approach.It's good and healthy for this divide to exist (because it's the premise of making something better, advancing a thought, otherwise you stagnate in one worldview) but it's wrong to assume one is better than the other, therefore everyone should adhere to this framework and abandon criticism).Moreover than that, people seem to be afraid to say: "I don't believe that, i think i can do better" when it comes to certain frameworks of thought.You definitely see stagnation on this kind in physics for example.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
"""
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/TheNegativeSuperstimulusTheory...
I found this assertion confusing. Speech in say, English (just to narrow it down), is musical inherently. The pitch and rhythm of a speaking voice, especially how they change while an individual is speaking, is meaningful meta-information about what is being said, and how the speaker feels about it, or what they mean by what they say.
We _absolutely_ use the music of everyday speech to create emphasis, for example, and in many other ways. Actors use pitch and rhythm when speaking to convey emotions. It is often the musical content of speech that makes or breaks the performance. Mismatching speech melodies with the dialog sounds all wrong.
I dunno, 10 years or so ago I wrote a whole MA thesis on this exact subject. It's long enough ago (and I've not stayed in the field I was in) that I've long forgotten many of the sources, but there is plenty of stuff out there that deals with speech and music.
To veer off into pure opinion: I definitely think music gains some of its emotional impact by virtue of its relationship to speech, given that we can interpret so much from the music of speech itself, and if that kind of metadata is presented _independently_ of natural speech, there's often something pleasing or interesting about about that. We also are super good at listening for other meaningful sounds though, like things that might kill us.
My two cents is that music, like other art and things like sports or games, leverages senses, instincts, and skills that evolved initially for other purposes, and uses them recreationally, playfully. To varying degrees, humans seem to like stimulating and playing with their senses in different ways.
I'm not convinced that the attempt to explain it the way the author does is worthwhile. Parts of it ring true and parts of it (like the role of discerning truth and the claim that people don't musicalize their speech) I think are off track, and maybe also constrained by a far too limited perspective of what music is in the first place.
Models be built from something, something related to the modeler's interpretation of their own interface into reality.
That said, it's nice that such a model was made; it's a nice reference / jumping off point. Someone more sensitive to their percepts and the nuances of life would be hard pressed to formalize any model at all; they'd be hard pressed to unfocus from the complexities and responsibilities of social life to do the abstract work of modeling.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPRvxTjfOk
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZFt9KUvYs8
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OxYUhAZOy0
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.
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.
1) This hand waves away a key part conversations, the process of establishing sufficient shared meaning to pass information. This process is most obvious in its absence from comedic conversations where two characters talk past eachother (e.g. who's on first.)
4) The percieved "spontaneity" of a statement does not have any fixed relationship with the effort we put into verifying the truth of that statement. It's effects are minimal compared to our perception of the intent of the speaker in making the statement.
5) This is a mandatory part of conversations? I extremely rarely see people respond to statements is such manner.
Conversations are diverse and conversationalists follow many different models, sometimes even within a conversation.
As far as I can tell, the Author is so set on the "music is a super stimulus of speech" that they have post-hoc invented an unrealistic model to make their hypothesis work.
In reality, music, like most art, exploits a wide variety of perceptual and cognitive quirks while referencing a shared set of cultural experiences. Trying to boil this down to "music is a super stimulus of conversational speech" is simplistic and boring.
This is just bad pseudo-psychology from someone who wrote a whole "science" book on the topic without actually doing any actual science.
Also, I don't see a way to actively separate information and emotion while someone is communicating to you while still being able to fully understand...that would just mean you are not paying attention to at least one of the signals...but maybe that IS what is happening when people pay more attention to body language and tone over the actual content.
Perhaps a better way to think of the split is that some of the audio content needs to be processed deliberately and sequentially—it has grammatical structure, words that need to be decoded, semantics, etc. It requires processing from the part of our brain that needs to deliberately pay attention to things. It's like reading or doing math.
Meanwhile, some of it can be processed more intuitively. It's where we pick up tone and emotional intent. We will absorb that even if we don't deliberately focus on it—you can tell that someone is angry when they speak even if you don't know their language.
Of course, understanding both of those requires integrating them together. The lexical content of their speech might tell you why they feel a certain way or what they feel that way about.
But one way to look at music is that it's a sound artifact designed to deliberately convey "I'm almost all non-grammatical, it's OK to not focus on me."
Again, of course, this is all pure conjecture.
That can't possibly be true for actual information (in the Shannon sense).
When you say to someone "go to the grocery store and buy a soda", these words can't be just 7% of the total information. Or put another way, what exactly do you communicate in the other 93% (13 times more information)
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.
Otherwise, nursing is very much a type 1 world of models that describe how nurses interact with the world around them.
This also applies to computing later (and still to this day) and pretty much everything else under the sun, including arts/liberal arts, for example: people who believed in the fundamental of beauty, complexity, hand-made craft, and some who would believe in the abstract notions, conveyed messages,etc.(you definitely see this throughout "modern art")
To me,making this distinction seems like the wrong approach.It's good and healthy for this divide to exist (because it's the premise of making something better, advancing a thought, otherwise you stagnate in one worldview) but it's wrong to assume one is better than the other, therefore everyone should adhere to this framework and abandon criticism).Moreover than that, people seem to be afraid to say: "I don't believe that, i think i can do better" when it comes to certain frameworks of thought.You definitely see stagnation on this kind in physics for example.
https://whatismusic.info/blog/index.html
"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)
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.
> (You can try, but I guarantee you will ruin the vibe of the conversation.)
I have invented 2 games:
These have occasionally gave me great joy in recreational everyday speaking (only for close friends with humor of course)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.
Deleted Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion