what it is they have against
repetition
They find it boring.
Would you come to HN every day if the linked articles never
changed?
I'm quite enamoured with Schmidthuber's theory of creativity [1, 2]
Schmidhuber develops a theory of
artificial curiosity and creativity for an autonomous agent. The
agent is equipped with an adaptive predictor trying to predict
future events from the history of previous events and actions. A
reward-maximising, reinforcement learning, adaptive controller is
steering the controller and gets curiosity reward for executing
action sequences that improve the predictor. (I term this "Pattern
Recognition as Pleasure".) This discourages the agent from
executing actions leading to boring outcomes that are either
predictable or totally unpredictable. Instead the controller
is motivated to learn actions that help the predictor to learn
new, previously unknown regularities in its environment, thus
improving its model of the world, which in turn can greatly help
to solve externally given tasks. Schmidhuber claims that his
corresponding formal theory of creativity explains essential
aspects of art, science, music, and humor.
If we were to take Schmidhuber's approach seriously, then that that which we enjoy as great art (as
creative) would be that which is on the edge of the observer's
ability to compress/understand. Note that this is highly observer
dependent! What I have been comprehending for a long time and
dismiss as boring, might be extremly interesting for somebody
else, and vice versa.
In my own life this was born out: I used to enjoy pop-music so
much and didn't worry about repetition -- in fact I didn't notice
it. I loved pop-music so much that I learned how to make it. This
lead to my disenchantment with pop-music: when I was finally able
to produce decent pop-music (I was able to compress it into a few
rules), I lost interest, and sought novelty elsewhere.
never heard of trance
I've certainly read Gilbert Rouget's
Music and trance [3]. The upshot of this book is that trance is not really tied to any musical quality, but a social effect where we copy other's behaviours.
[1] J. Schmidhuber, Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
[2] J. Schmidhuber, Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity & Creativity. https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674
[3] https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Music_and_Trance.html...