Hypotheses about Exact Repitition
I have identified the exact repetition of low-level components of music as playing a specific role in the perception of music.
So far I have come up with two hypotheses about what this role might be:
- Glial Illusion - Exact repetition confounds a mechanism in the brain which attempts to measure speech tempo of a speaker by measuring the rate at which different audio events occur.
- Perceptual Unification - Exact repetition of low-level small components of music signals to the brain that larger components are also repeated - and this forces the brain to consider similar but different musical phrases as somehow being different perceptions of the same thing.
The second hypothesis is attractive because it directly explains the transcendence of music (because the “same thing” perceived does not correspond to any actual real thing, so it is effectively “out-of-this-world”).
However this hypothesis at most explains the intensity of music, and does not address the issue of the emotional qualities of music (ie “happiness” vs “sadness”).
It is also unclear how to deal with song lyrics within this hypothesis. Rhyming is an example of exact repetition that occurs within the words of song lyrics, and applying the logic of the perceptual unification hypothesis implies that different lines of the lyrics of a song are somehow different perceptions of the same thing, some kind of ur-line.
Protomusic
If you read some of my earlier theoretical speculations about the evolution of music at https://whatismusic.info/blog/, you will see that I have proposed that protomusic was an ancestor of modern music, where protomusic, unlike music, was originally a form of pragmatic emotional communication.
According to my hypotheses about protomusic, words initially evolved as an incremental enhancement of protomusic, but, over time, the word-based component of the language grew in complexity in a manner which gradually conflicted more and more with the requirements for generating and comprehending protomusic.
Ultimately the word-based language had to leave the “home” in which it was born, and the original protomusic was strongly deprecated as a component of the system of pragmatic communication.
But, somehow, protomusic continues to exist as music, possibly as a result of superstimulus aspects of music (including the afore-mentioned exact repetition of low-level components) which, if strong enough, re-activate the now normally suppressed perception of protomusic.
Song Lyrics
The “problem” of song lyrics is:
- Can we identify what it is that is different between song lyrics and “normal” prose?
- Having identified the difference, can we explain why the musical context of song lyrics causes that difference to exist?
My theory of word-based language evolving within the context of protomusic, and ultimately conflicting with the repetitive nature of protomusic, does hint at a possible answer to these questions – that song lyrics may be a version of “normal” prose which is constrained by the perceptual requirements of protomusic, where those requirements conflict with the processes required for a listener to efficiently process “normal” prose.
And, maybe, we can develop a version of the perceptual unification hypothesis which includes protomusic – where the perceptions of projected ur-phrases (as described in The Perceptual Unification Hypothesis) actually is the perception of protomusic, and furthermore perceptual unification was how protomusic evolved in the first place.
A Hypothesized History of the Evolution of Protomusic and Word-Based Language
- Protomusic consisted of repeated vocalisations
- The vocalisations could vary as they repeated
- Information was encoded in two different ways:
- in the content of a single repetition of the vocalisation
- in the variation of the vocalisation across different repetitions
- In order to encode information in the variation as it occurred across repetitions, protomusic necessarily had to be repetitive.
- Protomusic encoded very abstract information, along the lines of “something good has happened” or “something bad has happened”, rather than a more specific “such-and-such has happened”.
- Words evolved as a mechanism to enhance protomusic by adding more specific detail to the abstract meanings of the protomusical vocalisations.
- Over time, the word-based component of the protomusical language evolved complex syntax, allowing multiple words to communicate more complex information within a single utterance.
- The repetitive nature of protomusic constrained the word-based component to also be repetitive. In particular, if a sentence with multiple words occurred within a protomusical vocalisation, the same sentence had to be repeated within each repeated vocalisation.
- This constraint prevented the word-based component of the language from achieving a full level of expression.
- To escape from this constraint, the word-enhanced protomusic had to be “demusicalized” so that the words were not constrained to fit into any particular time interval, and there was no requirement to unnecessarily repeat the word-based communication.