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What is Music?
Personal blog · whatismusic.info/blogphilosophyculture
What is Music? is a personal blog at whatismusic.info about philosophy and culture. Since 2015, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its speculative theories of what music is, such as music as rehearsal for hypothetical emotions, linked to dreaming, and music as a negative superstimulus for speech.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-13
- What Is Music?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-29
- Music is a negative superstimulus for speech (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-04
- Hypothesis: Music Lets Us Practice Feeling Strong Emotions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-12-23
What Hacker News says?
You are looking for a "theory of music", as opposed to "music theory", ie an explanatory or scientific theory. I offer my own efforts in this direction at http://whatismusic.info/ .
Comment linking /
on “Music theory for nerds”Submitted What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming as a story · 187 points
HN discussionReminds me of the theory that dreaming (and music) evolved to "practice" hypothetical situations and emotions before they happen - https://whatismusic.info/blog/AUnifiedTheoryOfMusicAndDreami... It's easy for me to believe that this could have initially evolved to give babies slightly more preparation for the outside world (and therefore a slightly higher chance of survival), and that we just happen to retain the ab…
Comment linking /blog/AUnifiedTheoryOfMusicAndDreaming.html
on “Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born”Submitted Music Generates Feelings That Are Only Weakly Bound to the Music as a story · 159 points
HN discussionSome toplined melodies - https://whatismusic.info/melodies/index.html
Comment linking /melodies/index.html
on “Ask HN: Do you create music? let's hear it”Submitted Music is a negative superstimulus for speech (2020) as a story · 79 points
HN discussionI take this opportunity to re-advertise my own alternative approach to developing a scientific theory of music: http://whatismusic.info/ .
Comment linking /
on “Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music”Submitted Music Science, for People Who Don't Like Music as a story · 17 points
HN discussionFrom https://whatismusic.info/blog/HypothesisMusicLetsUsPracticeH... : > Now let us suppose that the person enjoys listening to music. > > Music enables the person to feel very strong emotions that lie outside the range of their normal everyday emotions. > > Music lets a person feel these emotions, almost, but not quite, as if those emotions were real. I’m quite puzzled by these statements. I enjoy listening to some…
Comment linking /blog/HypothesisMusicLetsUsPracticeHavingStrongEmotions.html
on “What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming”Submitted What is Music? Towards a Working Definition of “Music” as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOne hypothesis is that music has evolved to be "difficult" to compose, because too much really good music would be bad for us: http://whatismusic.info/blog/OnTheDifficultyOfMusic.html
Comment linking /blog/OnTheDifficultyOfMusic.html
on “What makes music sound “good?””Submitted Hypothesis: Music Motivates Constancy of Emotional State as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy own theory of language acquisition and music: http://whatismusic.info/blog/LanguageDisplacementAndTheState... . I don't assume any pre-existing "universal grammar". What I do assume is a pre-existing classification of sounds into language and non-language. This hypothesis is somewhat confirmed by the recent results as described at http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273%2815%2901071-... (and see http://wha…
Comment linking /blog/IPredictedTheExistenceOfComponentFive.html
on “Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning”Submitted Why Does Music Trigger Maladaptive Daydreaming? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is quite similar in some ways to my own theory that I posted recently at https://whatismusic.info/blog/HypothesisMusicWasALanguageSys... , because it postulates a sudden transition from non-recursive language to recursive language. The one difference in my theory is that I assume that the original non-recursive language was musical (with one tune equals one meaning). And musical language could not evolve into a…
Comment linking /blog/HypothesisMusicWasALanguageSystem.html
on “Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k years ago: hypothesis”Submitted Music Is Not a Positive Superstimulus – It's a Negative Superstimulus as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMusic is not language and it is not "a language". It is something that _seems_ like language. This is because music has evolved as a mutated copy of part of the human language acquisition instinct. The mood change caused by music is a mutated copy of the mood change that accompanies initial language acquisition, and it serves a different purpose. The mood change that accompanies initial language acquisition helps to…
Comment linking /
on “Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2014)”Submitted Hypothesis: Music Lets Us Practice Feeling Strong Emotions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe 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. ""…
Comment linking /blog/TheNegativeSuperstimulusTheoryInThreeSentences.html
on “Music is a negative superstimulus for speech (2020)”Submitted Music Is a Vestigial Trait as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf 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... https://whatismusic.info/blog/index.html
Comment linking /blog/index.html
on “Music is a negative superstimulus for speech (2020)”Submitted The Characteristics of Musical Perception and Musical Pleasure as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIn 2015 I developed a theory that the human response to music is a mutated copy of an evolutionary pre-cursor, and the most likely pre-cursor is a response to speech-like sounds, where this response plays a role in the initial learning of language. I have documented the development of my theory in my "What is Music?" blog at http://whatismusic.info/blog/ . In their analysis of the human auditory cortex, Norman-Haign…
Comment linking /blog/
on “New Ways into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’”Submitted Hypothesis: Music Was a Language System as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMusic 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 profou…
Comment linking /
on “Dissonance – A Journey Through Musical Possibility Space”Submitted What Is Music? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Speaker Controls the Thoughts of the Listener as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Is Music? The Four Step Model of Speech Processing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Music Is Anti-Conversation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Are Emotions? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
