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We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

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Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#131

Post by tmh88j »

garmaine wrote: post #125
moyya wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious why you explicitly "hope there is no cure"? Seems like an odd wish. If music has little to no effect on you now, why would you even care? Furthermore if a "cure" did exist, what would be the downside of trying it?

I like who I am, and am perfectly happy the way I am. If you step back and look at it, letting vibrations in the air control your emotional state is kinda a scary proposition, no?

> If you step back and look at it, letting vibrations in the air control your emotional state is kinda a scary proposition, no?

How is that different than letting reflections of light off of objects control your emotional state? Do you also have no emotional reaction to art, or even as simple as preferring a certain color?

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#132

Post by rimunroe »

drblast wrote: post #52
qznc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. And by the way, since HN talked about Anki a few days ago [0], this is a nice little fact which I just entered into my database. Copy&pasted the first line of the Wikipedia article and used the cloze mechanism the ask for the term and its definition. Now I will never forget about musical anhedonia anymore. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846356

This is fascinating! Can any of you with musical anhedonia watch either of these songs and explain how you feel? https://youtu.be/SS0NHlWgi5w?t=3m22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5A9OCAyIk

Emotionally? Nothing really. It's just someone playing music, which doesn't really do anything for me. I appreciate that the person in the first video is doing some neat things with a guitar though. It looks & sounds neat.

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#133

Post by rimunroe »

philmcc wrote: post #64
qznc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. And by the way, since HN talked about Anki a few days ago [0], this is a nice little fact which I just entered into my database. Copy&pasted the first line of the Wikipedia article and used the cloze mechanism the ask for the term and its definition. Now I will never forget about musical anhedonia anymore. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17846356

I have a question for musical anhedonics: Do you find it harder to enjoy movies? Typically the score does so much _work_ in the name of emotional manipulation, that I wonder if it would make movies less enjoyable. More specifically I wonder if you would like certain movies (Spielberg) less and other movies (Er, Um. Who doesn't use scores that much?) more?

I dunno, I think soundtracks to movies are one of the only places where I ever get any sort of emotional response from music, and it's always because I associate some sequence of sounds in the piece with something that's happening in the film then. It doesn't feel like appreciating the music so much as just being reminded of the part of the movie that happened around that time. Sort of like an aural mile marker.

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#134

Post by root_axis »

irrational wrote: post #123
moyya wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious why you explicitly "hope there is no cure"? Seems like an odd wish. If music has little to no effect on you now, why would you even care? Furthermore if a "cure" did exist, what would be the downside of trying it?

From what I can see, there is no upside to enjoying music. People spend so much time and money (attending concerts, paying for streaming services, buying music, buying instruments, practicing instruments, listening to the music, etc.) that I'm able to happily use elsewhere. If I enjoyed music I might want to start using my time and money for those things.

> If I enjoyed music I might want to start using my time and money for those things.

If you were enjoying it then how would it differ from any of the other variety of things you already enjoy that you spend money on?

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#135

Post by rimunroe »

gwern wrote: post #104
rimunroe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa! I had no idea this was a thing! I'd always thought it was just some weird thing about me. I don't really get a whole lot of pleasure out of music, or get moved by music much. I almost never listen to music. When I do listen, it's usually to drown out external noise or help me focus, but in that case I usually just listen to the same song on a loop.

Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia ( http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337 ) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :) There's actually quite a lot of…

> Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :)

That's exactly what's happening to me right now! I always just kind of assumed people were just using overly flowery speech to describe music! I remember one time in high school a kid who was way into music got really mad at me when I said I didn't really like music much. He said that I didn't seem much more than a sack of meat if I couldn't enjoy music.

> it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors.

I've known I had a color vision deficiency since I was really young, but it isn't very strong so I don't run into trouble much. I only really got a strong example (outside of a purpose-built color vision test type thing) recently while playing Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress has a world map which represents volcanos as little red "^" marks. I was generating worlds repeatedly looking for a volcano near some grasslands. I was getting frustrated because I'd look at a map and wouldn't see anything. But after staring at the grassy areas for a while, I'd slowly start to see them. There were usually quite a few volcanos actually, it just was hard for me to find them. I was kind of confused as to why I wasn't seeing them easily before it hit me that the grassland is shown as green characters.

I tried showing a map to my sibling and my partner, both of whom have normal color vision. They both found all the volcanos immediately with no issues. It was wild!

Fortunately, Dwarf Fortress lets you customize all the colors used by the game. I should be able to make a higher contrast color palette for myself in the future.

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#136

Post by plaguuuuuu »

firdak wrote: post #108
lqet wrote: post #2

Related: recent studies have shown that there are people with "musical anhedonia", and that this condition may affect 3 to 5% of the world population [1]. These people "get" music, meaning that they can learn to sing or play an instrument, remember and recognize melodies etc., but they are completely unable to receive any pleasure from it. As someone who gets a significant amount of his daily joy from listening to mu…

> As someone who gets a significant amount of his daily joy from listening to music... I, in turn, find this somewhat astonishing. Not only is it so different from my own experience, it's difficult to understand. When you're enjoying a piece of music, you can at least imagine what it would be like not to feel anything. For me, though, when I see people enjoying music, it's so confusing. What am I "supposed" to be fee…

Music is a form of communication. What I experience in certain pieces of music is a connection with a particular set or category of feelings that verbal language is simply unable to describe with an equivalent clarity and it's a sort of empathy shared with the composer.

edit: Can you guess what people might feel from this piece? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#137

Post by rimunroe »

tmh88j wrote: post #131
garmaine wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like who I am, and am perfectly happy the way I am. If you step back and look at it, letting vibrations in the air control your emotional state is kinda a scary proposition, no?

> If you step back and look at it, letting vibrations in the air control your emotional state is kinda a scary proposition, no? How is that different than letting reflections of light off of objects control your emotional state? Do you also have no emotional reaction to art, or even as simple as preferring a certain color?

I'm not them, and don't find that scary at all (speech certainly affects my emotional state!) but I don't have any color preference, or feel like I have anywhere near the emotional reaction to art that other people do.

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#138

Post by kaoD »

civility wrote: post #97
kaoD wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given your second paragraph... are you perhaps confusing tonality with chord quality? Amin (the chord) is a diatonic chord of C major (the tonality). Also, it's easy to play "random" chords from a tonality and end up in a different mode without even realizing it. E.g.: A minor (the key, also known as A aeolian) has the exact same diatonic chords as C major (but the reference, i.e. tonal center, is A instead of C). A…

Sorry, I should have compared C-major and C-minor keys. If I play a C-major scale, and then a C-minor scale, C-minor sounds sadder in comparison. But if I just play ascending thirds (R 3 2 4 3 5 4 6 5 7 6 R) in C-minor, it doesn't sound sad to me. Moreover, it's easy to make C-major sound sad by playing descending thirds (reverse of above).

Music is completely relative and context dependent. There's no such thing as an absolute minor scale: it all depends on what has been and what's to come. It's hard to derive a strong tonality from just a scale, they're pretty ambiguous.

C major has the exact same notes of A minor, and C minor/aeolian has the same notes of Eb major/ionian (and 5 other modes with different qualities: F dorian, G phrygian, Ab lydian, Bb mixolydian, D locrian... all have the exact same notes).

Even if you think of C aeolian when playing you might be implying a different tonal center, depending on your emphasis, and therefore a non-aeolian progression.

Your ears can latch to any tonal center depending on exact phrasing. With no harmony there is no clear tonal center (and even with harmony, it's easy to switch between related modes, even unkowingly, because they have the same notes _and_ the same diatonic chords).

> But if I just play ascending thirds (R 3 2 4 3 5 4 6 5 7 6 R) in C-minor

Are you playing that in a 3/4 rhythm? (R b3 2) (4 b3 5) (4 b6 5) (b7 b6 R) the downbeats are R-4-4-b7 (no characteristic minor tones) your ears are hearing the minor tones as passing tones. Since aeolian has no leading tone (natural 7, one semitone away from R) the tonal center is even more ambiguous.

You might be hearing that as Bb mixolydian: (2 4 3) (5 4 6) (5 b7 6) (R b7 2), downbeats on 2-5-5-R which is _the_ canonical major jazz progression (ii-V-I). The phrasing implies ii-V (ambiguous if major V or minor v)-v (minor due to b7 of I being b3 of v, establishes mixolydian)-I. V-I is a pretty strong (if not the strongest) tonality indicator.

Bb mixolydian is a major mode, hence why it doesn't sound particularly minor to you.

Try playing the C minor with ascending thirds over a C harmonic minor _progression_ while emphasizing the V-i cadence and the characteristic minor tones (namely, b3 and b6). Notice I said harmonic minor progression, which has a leading tone to strongly stablish tonal center (which is what it was invented for).

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#139

Post by esfandia »

bane wrote: post #114
sizzle wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this compare to an orgasm?

It's a different kind of experience, but definitely clustered in the "feelings of intense pleasure" cluster. I'd say that musical frisson is much more of an emotionally driven feeling that encompasses a much larger part of the body. The intensity ranges all over the place from a small feeling of "nice!" to intense, almost physically disabling, feelings of absolute bliss that have left me weeping like I'd just experie…

Do you mind sharing what kind of music triggers this in you? The closest to this for me has been late 60's psychedelic music.

Re: We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?

#140

Post by KozmoNau7 »

Balgair wrote: post #91
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love music as well, I can't imagine living without it, and I generally go to 4-5 concerts every month. The idea that something I find so pleasurable does absolutely nothing to some people is really interesting to me.

(I think) I'm anhedonic and it's interesting to me that you can get pleasure out of just the music. To me, it's nice to have things on in the background, or to watch people do something they love. Sometimes, when the lyrics of a song are good and the setting is right (like when driving) that's good too. Like, you can sway the car to the beat, and that's fun. But otherwise, I dunno, there really isn't anything there f…

I don't know exactly why it is pleasurable, but to me it's sometimes about the sound itself. I just find some sounds pleasing, like the vibration of a cello string being bowed or a dirty electric guitar riff with tons of distortion. Very specifically I love the distortion produced by the Boss HM-2 pedal, which a lot of my favorite metal bands use. Perhaps it's something about the "texture" of certain sounds that I find very appealing.

It's not just the sound itself though, there's also something about a good riff or a well-written chorus. I don't get music that's too free-form, like improvisational jazz or stuff with way too many tempo changes. There has got to be a groove, a rhythm, a flow, a drive and a connection between the instruments, so they're playing together, to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

There is obviously also something to be said for emotional connections to specific songs or passages. As an example just off the top of my head, I read The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as they were published when I was 7-9 years old, they were part of my formative years, as you might say.

So when I listen to Tuomas Holopainen's 2014 concept album Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge, it just touches something in me, I get all emotional and well up, especially at this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k

I obviously don't expect other people to have quite the same reaction, but to me, aside from being a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, it also tugs deeply at my childhood nostalgia, and elevates the music to a whole new level for me.

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