How is music possible

gist

Henrik Karlsson asks how tones in simple mathematical relationships can make familiar trees look otherworldly. He finds music psychology unsatisfying, whether it treats music as hacking auditory and emotional cues or as culturally learned associations, and he finds Schopenhauer's metaphysics emptier still. His tentative answer is emergence: like dunes from sand grains, the vast experiences music produces cannot be read off its mundane building blocks, and the space of possible music is a continent we have barely explored.

ideas

• Perception theories feel too thin. Explaining communal singing as overtones and reward circuits misses the open connection to strangers that it creates.
• Culture shapes the cues. The Kalash of northwestern Pakistan rate minor chords as positive and describe major chords as strange.
• Metaphysics explains nothing. Attributing music to God or Schopenhauer's Will waves the mystery away, while arising from neural circuits would at least be miraculous.
• Music may be emergent. Like axioms in mathematics or sand in dunes, small rules can hide structure that needs its own concepts.
• Most of the continent is unvisited. Commercial radio plays from a tiny valley of possible music, which Karlsson compares to using only three or four colors.

quotes