Ready Player One is a nice bit of fluff and wish-fulfillment, with some really beautifully executed imagery. Behind that, it’s a basic good guys versus bad guys conflict, and the end is predictable and you can put your brain in “park” and enjoy the explosions. I won’t say “it was a waste of film” because I’m sure everyone involved worked very hard and it was shot on digital. But this is not a review of the movie – I want to discuss thoughts I had during the movie.
During the course of the movie, there were several moments where I experienced a distinct shock of pleasure.
One of those was when I caught a particularly obscure reference: there’s a part in the movie (this barely counts as a “spoiler”, don’t worry) where someone needs to cast a mighty spell. And the spell’s invocation is “Anal Natrach Uth Vas Bethyd …” I had to smother a happy laugh. It’s the generic spell invocation from John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur. [wc] I felt a similar shock when I recognized a certain costume as Buckaroo Banzai’s loose tie and popped-collar gray blazer. (Yes, I did that in the 1980s, briefly)
Perhaps I’m giving away too much about Ready Player One if I mention that it’s a movie that leaves you plenty of space to think about other things while you’re watching it.
So I started thinking about our brains, and the cognitive process of recognizing things. Maybe I was committing a bit of evolutionary psychology; I’m not sure. Here’s the idea:
It stands to reason that our brain would reward itself for a successful pattern-match.
That would be a necessary part of any recognition feedback loop – you need a way of telling the recognizer when it has succeeded, so that it can tune or de-tune its rules for next time. So, if you’re waiting by the watering-hole for a deer to come try to eat your cilantro, so you can kill the deer and eat yummy venison pizza, you need a way for your brain to tell itself “you are right!” and pat itself on the occipital lobe when it recognizes a deer. (that’s the back of a brain, right?) If that’s reasonably close to what’s going on, it’s the beginning of an explanation for a lot of cognition:
- Clearly, it confers survival benefits
- It’s not a large step from recognition of reality to using the same underlying mechanism to hypothesize about possible realities – i.e.: imagination
- Hypothesizing about possible realities and recognizing them when they occur would be a powerful feedback loop to teach us “that worked, do it again” or “that did not work, avoid it.”
- Confirmation bias would then be a built-in side-effect of the pattern-matching weightings based on individual patterns success or failure
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in artificial intelligence research: one of the hot topics in AI is how to develop training sets that reinforce desired patterns and another is how to build learning into a feedback loop without introducing unwanted cognitive bias. In AI we have no problem, at all, introducing confirmation bias – in fact, we want it. We skeptics complain about confirmation bias when we see it in christians, but we want Alexa to learn quickly that when I mutter a certain sound, that I am, in fact, saying the same thing.
Back around 2007 I had a conversation with Bill Cheswick in which he asserted that “music doesn’t work on me.” I though that was quite bizzare and I said so. He said “I suspect that someday we’ll figure out why people’s brains like it – and we’ll discover that it’s an error in how brains process input.” I don’t think Bill had that quite right – I think that brains’ enjoyment of music is based on mashing the recognizer’s input queue over and over with recognizable stuff, which triggers that little shock of pleasure that I experienced so distinctly during the movie. In other words, it’s not a bug, it’s a side-effect of a feature.
Is there someone on this blog that is not happy? [wc]
And that’s what I think of Ready Player One – it mashed on a lot of gamer and 80s retro- happy buttons, and it mashed on them hard and very effectively. There were moments during the movie where I thought “wow, was that a Spartan from HALO?” or whatever, felt happy for recognizing it, and immediately wondered if they had just stuck that momentary flash of HALO iconic character in just to make the HALO players happy.
I enjoyed it, because I was pre-loaded with cognitive bias to enjoy it.
At the level I’m talking about, I am pretty comfortable with assuming that this is a built-in brain function, not a learned behavior. Because, I suppose, it’s a question of what learning is: it’s a feedback loop that amplifies cognitive biases toward actions that are successful and away from actions that are unsuccessful. It has to encompass an ability to assess cause and effect within the limits of the experience – if you drop a hammer on your toe it’s not useful to assess cause and effect within the light-cone going back from the event – our ability to learn things at all works better if we have a more accurate assessment of proximal cause and effect, and a limited imagination. But those appear to be learned behaviors! Piaget’s experiments on children appear to show that early learning builds up our ideas of cause and effect and imagination (object persistence) – his term was “precausal thinking” [wik] – and if you’ve ever observed a baby beginning to establish its response loops, I think you’ll unavoidably have some sympathy for Piaget’s theories. Piaget doesn’t explicitly point it out but at the point where a baby develops “object persistence”, can it be said to have figured out how to imagine things that it’s not sure are there?
All of this stuff loops me back to the creeping awareness that there are cognitive processes in our brains, and that we exploit them for our own amusement – and others exploit them for their benefit. It’s going to be important to stay on the power-curve with this stuff, because if commercial manufacturers are able to figure it out ahead of us, they’ll be able to make music we can’t avoid, foods we can’t help but love, Facebook we cannot bear to quit. Of course, this has been going on, already, for a long time. When I hear Donald Trump speak, I hear the cadences of a mega-church pastor – the repetition and rhythm that are most familiar and comforting to his constituents; perhaps they are primed to accept being lied to in that tone of voice. When I play World of Warcraft, or any computerized RPG derived from it, I see the sequence of quest-lines that have been designed to pull you in for “just one more.” The recognizer/reward cycle even explains advertising: get people familiar enough with something, they’ll buy it because they get that little shot of pleasure when they recognize it when it’s time to make a purchase.
Her fingers and palm slipped gracefully over the panel. A tune of utter monotony filled the room with agonizing, unforgettable banality. It was the quintessence of every melodic cliché Reich had ever heard. No matter what melody you tried to remember, it invariably led down the path of familiarity to “Tenser, Said The Tensor.” Then Duffy began to sing:
Eight, sir; seven, sir;
Six, sir; five, sir;
Four, sir; three, sir;
Two, sir; one!
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tension, apprehension,
And dissension have begun.“Oh my God!” Reich exclaimed.
“I have some real gone tricks in that tune,” Duffy said, still playing. “Notice the beat after ‘one’? That’s a semicadence. Then you get another beat after ‘begun.’ That turns the end of the song into a semicadence, too, so you can’t ever end it. The beat keeps you running in circles, like: Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun. RIFF. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun. RIFF. Tension, appre–“
“You little devil!” Reich started to his feet, pounding his palms on his ears. “I’m accursed. How long is this affliction going to last?”
“Not more than a month.”
That’s from Alfred Bester’s 1971 masterpiece The Demolished Man [wc] in which Duffy Wyg& explains some media jingle-making, and how they weaponize cognitive tricks to trap brains. Spielberg does that in Ready Player One, too.
Alexa: I have not got any “Internet of things” in my presence, nor am I likely to, until the product developers manage to build it unavoidably into everything. However, I will extend extra-special credit to anyone who programs some kind of AI thingie to open their garage door when they intone, “Anal Natrach Uth Vas Bethyd …” Or maybe brew you some coffee when you say “Cthulhu ftaghn.”
I did not go any farther with “Anal Natrach Uth Vas Bethyd …” because I have no idea how to spell the rest. “Doch El Neh Tjenveh” comes to mind.
Messed up: Most recently, on oxycodone and some fireball and cider when I was suffering from my kidney stone. But I have experienced the same cognitive effect while listening to music on nitrous oxide or mushrooms. For science, naturally.
Limited imagination: an unlimited imagination would amount to cognitive noise: you’d by hypothesizing a huge thicket of possibilities, which would be vastly wrong.
Piaget experiments: Piaget, naturally, experimented only on French children. Can we generalize? I am biased toward Piaget because he actually did experiments and was concerned with the problem of making sure his subjects didn’t fool him. Which is a bit easier when you’re dealing with babies who haven’t learned what “fooling people” even is.
By the way, Piaget’s book on infant development is a great gift for a new parent (before the child is born) – they can watch along as it goes through the various stages that Piaget identifies, of its various cognitive systems coming online. “For entertainment purposes only.”
Hollywood: Do not make bad Alfred Bester movies. We saw what you did with Philip Dick’s books. There will be no second warning.
Minor point, Piaget, naturally, experimented only on French children.
Eh? Piaget was Swiss. I am pretty sure most of his career was in Geneva.
I remember a colloquium one of his MA students gave at my university. Heavy Swiss-French accent mixed in with a good pinch of Australian as he did his Ph.D in Canberra.
jrkrideau@#1:
I thought he was French! Whups!
Thanks for the correction.
Do you know about the Amen Break? It’s a 6 second loop from an obscure song that has literally formed the backbone of an entire sub-genre of music (drum n’ bass), and been sampled thousands of times in hip-hop, pop, and now commercials, often being broken down into tiny fractions of a second and re-ordered, which probably allows your brain to get its recognition fix and a novelty fix at the same time.
In terms of it being able to be chopped up to simultaneously create recognition and novelty, it’s no different from the breaks to Funky Drummer or Apache (the three of them are probably the most sampled pieces of music in history, though I’m too lazy to check).
There’s a pretty in depth look at its history here, with someone who sounds like he’s been run through an emotion-removing filter but is nevertheless really insightful:
Using the future tense is not appropriate in this sentence. It has been done already a while ago. For example, here https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html is an overview about how science was used to create “foods we can’t help but love.”
Trump’s speeches work exactly the opposite way on me. I really dislike the way how he speaks. If I needed to find out the contents of one of his speeches, I’d look for a transcript instead—I really hate the way how he speaks that much. Several years ago I had a university professor who spoke in a similar manner. That one turned into the worst university course I have ever taken, because I just couldn’t stand going to the lectures. I cannot say what exactly is the problem, but for me there’s something very off-putting about this manner of speaking.
Well, it should appear to succeed. So long as it seems to you that you recognized something and not that you cognized it for the first time, then you get a sense of recognition. If your senses/memories/etc. are faulty, you could just as well believe you recognized something anyway, even though in some sense you didn’t really do so.
I’m not sure what you had in mind for a “reward” … dopamine or something like that? If the brain rewards itself, however that happens, but reality doesn’t reward it with being correct, is that sort of mistake/delusion/etc. what you’d want to call a “success”?
It can, when it works correctly…. But that’s not determined subjectively. If you think you recognized a deer, but in reality it was a tiger, that’s probably not beneficial to your survival. There has to be some actual deer out there, in addition to appropriate brain processes that give you an experience of recognizing it (feedback loops or whatever), because it wouldn’t suffice to merely believe that you got it right this time only to be promptly ripped apart by the tiger after patting yourself on the back. I’m sure you get this, but it’s just not clear how you think that fits into the frameworks you’re using here.
Indeed, as I just emphasized, you’re already imagining things, like it or not. If the possible thing you’re imagining happens to be the actual thing that’s going on (or close enough to it), then your brain state has successfully been coordinated with the external world, and you might yet survive to do it again another day. (You might think of “success” in other terms, and that’s just one.) If you have some additional kind of thought that this state isn’t necessarily representing the actual world — that this is okay, because you’re intentionally considering possibilities and not necessarily something actual — then you’ve got a way to use this imagination for something else, some creative activity or what have you. Of course, that’s useful too, as I just said, and this sort of thing can apparently be good for our survival too, since there’s no need for an extremely strict correspondence between the brain and the world it’s representing, as you might naively think.
Well, I’d want to make a bunch of distinctions here. I mean, first of all, it hardly needs to be said that there are tons of important differences between the music of Ludwig Beethoven and Philip Glass and Christina Aguilera, so I’m already a little uncomfortable that they’re all lumped together and talked about in such vague generality. Anyway, there just is repetition in most music, along with various kinds of similarity. That’s not quite the same thing as being self-referential (or having a relatively small/simplified vocabulary, as may be the case with somebody like Aguilera, which I hasten to add is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it coincidentally is).
Why does repetition happen in music? I don’t exactly know. Some people are looking for symmetry in what they create, others want to evoke memories, other cases may just come down to historical/cultural influences which could be totally outside of any consious process of deliberation…. We could speculate all day (or for the rest of our lives) on these “why” questions, and it wouldn’t get us very far.
But no matter what, you’re certainly structuring events (sounds) in time. At any moment, similar things could happen or different things could happen. Those are your only two options. What we see is that both occur, and now your proto-theory here is just putting extra weight on the repetition and downplaying the differences. One could have a pattern that’s “random” so to speak – still a pattern in the minimal sense of the word — but on the other hand, your options are also constrained for a variety of reasons, so we need to be careful about what we’d mean by that.
If I flip a coin over and over, it will be a random sequence, yet I will see multiple heads and multiple tails: repetition strikes again! There are just the two large/flat sides of the coin which constrain the outcomes, and similarly the materials used in music are somewhat limited. But that’s not really the type of interesting or meaningful pattern that we’re usually looking for. We want to know why it mostly came up heads early on, then tails for a while, then back to heads at the end of the sequence. That’s one sort of structure in music (ternary or arch form or there are many other terms) which is good for creating certain artistic effects and provoking people to have certain kinds of experiences, while others are good for accomplishing something else, like telling a particular story or “painting” a certain mental picture or whatever it may be. Yes, you could just as well get them with random flips of the coin (without that being “for” anything), but then again, it’s not very likely to happen with a random process.
Presumably, we’re pretty good at noticing these “unlikely” things and attributing agency/intentionality to them. It’s the design argument for theism, if you like. People see lots of life, and they think God wanted life. They see lots of rocks, and they think God wanted rocks. (Or they should, if they were being consistent… but they mostly don’t pay much attention to rocks.) They see lots of crap on television, and they think God (or somebody) wanted crap on television.
Enkidum @#3
I actually like how the narrator speaks in that video. I perceive this kind of voice as calming.
Oh good, everyone else has already taken care of making intelligent comments, so I’ll just say: I freaking LOVE Buckaroo Banzai. I wish I had it on a DVD. I thought it was a shame they never made more.
@Ieva Skrebele, #4: I do SO AGREE with you about Trump’s voice! I can’t stand it either and just about can not bear to listen to him speak. Everyone else I know thinks that is very silly of me; nice to know there is at least one other human who agrees!
I was being oblique about Trump: I loathe his voice and the cadence and range he uses – it sounds like a mega-church pastor (for the same reasons I think mega-church pastors do!) repetition is also part of that. He emphasizes the key words he is trying to drill into his listener’s recognizers.
I loathe his way of speaking because I recognize it as manipulation and I resent anyone who tries to manipulate me.
I see your Merlin and raise you one Ash…
/random favorite nostalgia quote
On a bit of a tangent, from your linked article, re: Tom Kelly on Beethoven’s 9th (writing it here since it’s a new post):
I contend that there have been trolls since time immemorial, so this should be no surprise. Also, trolls apparently don’t need to be fed, as they thrive and proliferate in some other fashion, so whether or not to do it is not the question.
By our standards, Paris circa 1913 sounds to me like it was in a constant state of near-rioting, more or less, inside and outside of the concert halls and theaters. So the atmosphere during the Rite’s first performance may not have been all that exceptional. (It apparently wasn’t played up to Igor’s standards, either, by the way … that’s also not unusual.) However, it’s also true that it was undoubtedly a groundbreaking piece of new music, so there definitely was something be upset about … if being upset is the sort of thing you’ll do if you’re not very open to new experiences. (It’s a shame people don’t give enough credit to his other ballets though. I’ve always liked Firebird and especially Petrushka. And Apollo aka Apollon Musagete is a favorite, while being much more traditional in many respects.)
People often have very weird impressions of the past, but definitely our standards of concert etiquette and decorum are a fairly modern thing. You would traditionally talk and drink and gamble and fight and do all sorts of wild shit, during concerts, ballets, operas, plays, etc. If it were an aristocratic court, then it may be another story (unless the king/duke/whoever-the-fuck was feeling particularly rude that day), but publicly that’s just how it worked. Listening and watching attentively were not really the norm at all, and only once it became understood that these were (some of them) important historical works, worth your undivided attention and to be deemed “classical” or some such, did it become a thing to treat them that way. But that takes time, among other things.
Today it also depends a great deal on which concert it is, since many “classical” ones take themselves less seriously than others. Go to Bayreuth and you should expect more or less ecstatic, quasi-religious veneration of Saint Wagner and an unquestioning attitude about the stupendous marvelousness of everything he made. Many other places, not so much. The same thing happens with more or less hardcore Star Wars fans.
Finally, to be a little fairer to Beethoven, I suspect his reputation for having a bad temper (or Mozart’s for being something of a petulant child) is probably in part because he was putting up with all sorts of unhinged asshattery among his audiences, performers, critics, and so forth. It’s worth pointing out that we know an incredible amount about him, but we don’t know so much about (or neglect/ignore) the shit he had to put up with from all sorts of bad actors. He did have a bad side, for sure. Still, he was probably a more normal or well-adjusted person than some people tend to think, and he’s sometimes been painted as a sort of villain because it’s not so easy to see things from his perspective.
kestrel @#7
It never occurred to me that not liking some voice/manner of speech could be perceived as silly. People have their individual and subjective likes and dislikes when it comes to music, art, food, movies, etc. It only makes sense that we would also like or dislike some voice or manner of speech. Of course people are going to have different opinions about whether some person’s speech is irritating or not.
Marcus @#8
It’s definitely different for me. I cannot really say what it is exactly that I dislike about the way how Trump speaks. Emphasizing some words? That’s what every good orator is supposed to do; after all, speaking monotonously is a bad thing. Repetitions? There were plenty of repetitions in “I Have a Dream” and “Ain’t I a Woman?” and I perceive those as amazing speeches. If I attempt to analyze the way how Trump speaks, it gets even harder for me to tell what it is exactly that I dislike. It cannot be the feeling of being manipulated either. I’m not very familiar with American mega-church pastors, and Latvian pastors instead tend to talk in calm and soothing voices. And my university professor whose manner of speech I couldn’t stand wasn’t trying to manipulate the students, he was just a normal professor. And I took that course some years ago, long before Trump was elected, probably back then I hadn’t even heard the speeches of any American pastors. I cannot tell what it is exactly that I dislike about the way how Trump speaks, there’s just something that I dislike. And I dislike not only Trump’s speeches, my brain reacts the same way also to other people who tend to speak in a similar manner.
I had a double-layered experience of this the other day watching “Justice League”. I was surprised at how not-terrible it was. Not good, by any means, but not the trainwreck I was expecting. But twice in the film I experienced a double stab of this – once when they played just an echo of the 1989 Keaton Batman theme, and once when they played just a stab of the ’78 Reeve Superman theme. I had the pleasant shock of realisation, immediately followed by a stab of self-hatred for being so easily manipulated, then a little follow-up of disdain for the cynicism of the makers. Interesting.
Do you remember back in the 1990s or so, when P. Duddy – or whatever he called himself – would put brief samples from other songs at the start of his own? I thought the point was to remind you that you would rather be listening to something else, but perhaps I misinterpreted…
I can’t listen to Trump saying anything without my inner voices yelling “Moron!” or “Liar!!” or “Fucking moronic lying asshole!!!”.
It’s a bit distracting.
I have tried reading transcripts but it’s no better.
Many years ago I worked at a factory in Bray, Ireland just down the road from the film studio where much of Excalibur was filmed.
In the toolmaking shop there was an exquisite sword hanging on the wall, the owner’s son told me that when Excalibur was being filmed that someone from the studio came by and asked for a sword to be made, so the toolmaker dutifully made a steel sword worthy of the name (OK, so he didn’t forge it, just cut a very nice looking prop sword from a plate of tool steel with the mill).
Apparently the sword was too heavy though because they soon came back and asked for an aluminum version instead. The toolmaker made a new lightweight sword and swapped them out and kept the “Real Excalibur” on the wall.
I have to wonder if it’s still there…
Patrick Slattery #15
I ♥ the whole notion of aluminum swords.
The combatants would wet themselves laughing.
chigau@#16:
I ♥ the whole notion of aluminum swords.
The combatants would wet themselves laughing.
The sword Schwartznegger swung in Conan was aluminum (made by Jody Powell, if I recall correctly) – it is not uncommon at all for a movie-blade to be produced in a variety of forms and levels of detail, so they can use it depending on shooting requirements. The Conan sword has some pretty nice bronze castings on the heroic version – the shooting prop was an aluminum blade with poly/bronze resin fittings.
Almost always, when you see someone swinging a sword and it looks light as a feather, that’s because it is.
Enkidum@#3:
Do you know about the Amen Break? It’s a 6 second loop from an obscure song that has literally formed the backbone of an entire sub-genre of music (drum n’ bass), and been sampled thousands of times in hip-hop, pop, and now commercials, often being broken down into tiny fractions of a second and re-ordered, which probably allows your brain to get its recognition fix and a novelty fix at the same time.
That is fascinating (and the video’s narrator was … interesting) – thanks for sharing that. It vaguely reminds me of the Axis of Awesome’s 4-chord song. Is the similarity why we like it? Otherwise we have to theorize that there is something else that makes us like it, and then we’re into all kinds of evolutionary psychology stories.
Ieva Skrebele@#4:
Using the future tense is not appropriate in this sentence. It has been done already a while ago. For example, here https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html is an overview about how science was used to create “foods we can’t help but love.”
Yes, the way in which foods have been tailored to be nearly irresistable has been going on for some time. I didn’t mention that one because I’m not sure if that’s a cognitive thing, or a side-effect of how our perception of flavors works. But it’s the same principle, right? Figure out what gives a little squirt of pleasure and mash on that button.
I really hate the way how he speaks that much.
Yeah, me too.
Listen to the weird-ass way some of these revival preachers talk, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eJmsSOdccc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U89zkUZPd5w
I don’t know, but it seems to me that someone who had their brains blown full of that garbage might recognize Trump-speak.
consciousness razor@#5:
If your senses/memories/etc. are faulty, you could just as well believe you recognized something anyway, even though in some sense you didn’t really do so.
I always felt that a “deja vu” is probably a recognition error. What if you had the experience of recognizing something, and you were simply mistaken? What would that feel like? Would it feel like a “deja vu”?
[I am not pretending to have answers to any of these questions.]
I’m not sure what you had in mind for a “reward” … dopamine or something like that? If the brain rewards itself, however that happens, but reality doesn’t reward it with being correct, is that sort of mistake/delusion/etc. what you’d want to call a “success”?
I assumed it was probably something like a teeny little shot of dopamine. It would appear as though the underlying mechanism for recognizing things and triggering a reward or some other response would be one of the building blocks of the system for learning. And, it would make sense, too – there are some things (“burrito!”) that ought to trigger a pleasant shock of recognition whereas others out to trigger a shock of alarm (“grizzly bear!”). Further, I would argue that the mechanism would be something evolved but the upper levels of what we recognize cannot be (“Christiana Aguilera!”) not being around long enough to be part of our genetic complement.
The reason I go down this rathole is because I’m curious about evolutionary psychology and the great nature/nurture argument. To me it appears that a lot of the mechanisms that are being claimed by the evolutionary psychologists are mechanisms that must be there in order for learning, pattern-matching, vocabulary, etc., to function – but for them to exist on an evolutionary time-scale there are a lot of things that have to be learned because they have only existed during our lifetimes. We need a way to know to get away from the railroad tracks when a train is coming, but would not have been able to evolve-in a “train” matching neuronal structure. On the other hand, to be able to match “train”->”move!” we need to evolve-in a matching and an if-then capability.
If you think you recognized a deer, but in reality it was a tiger, that’s probably not beneficial to your survival. There has to be some actual deer out there, in addition to appropriate brain processes that give you an experience of recognizing it (feedback loops or whatever), because it wouldn’t suffice to merely believe that you got it right this time only to be promptly ripped apart by the tiger after patting yourself on the back.
Right. I believe that what you’ve pointed out is why we react disprortionately to some unknowns. If we are sure it’s a deer, then we can be pleased with the situation and start hypothesizing how that venison is going to taste. But if we see something that is clearly not a deer, but is deer-colored, give us a bump of adrenaline and warn us to be quiet while we figure things out. That’s basically the same thing as the train. Presumably we don’t just trigger on “train rushing toward me!” we have “unknown thing rushing toward me!” – I assume that if we are confused and get multiple signals they must reinforce eachother enough of the time that we don’t just stand there going, “shall I call that thing a ‘truck’?”
There has to exist some form of binding between past experiences and what we are perceiving at any time; that’s how we access our memory and categorize things and label them into groups. Then, there is the whole topic of how those groups are processed and how we establish meaning – I generally accept Chomsky’s argument which, if I understand it correctly, is that that is what language is for. Of course that raises the question of how other species use language, which is a great unasked question because a lot of humans’ sense of specialness depends on their use of language. (Safina argues that that’s bunk, and I agree)
Indeed, as I just emphasized, you’re already imagining things, like it or not. If the possible thing you’re imagining happens to be the actual thing that’s going on (or close enough to it), then your brain state has successfully been coordinated with the external world, and you might yet survive to do it again another day.
It appears to me that we discuss these mechanisms as though they are separate but they really aren’t; they’re sub-components of a bigger thing that I suppose is “consciousness.” For our imagination to confer a survival benefit we use it to project how things might happen, and then when we recognize that they happen in that way, we reward ourselves – sometimes with venison, but always with a sense of satisfaction or frustration that our projection worked. I throw a spear at a deer and I get venison, yay, me! I had to imagine a whole bunch of different things for that to happen.
Well, I’d want to make a bunch of distinctions here. I mean, first of all, it hardly needs to be said that there are tons of important differences between the music of Ludwig Beethoven and Philip Glass and Christina Aguilera, so I’m already a little uncomfortable that they’re all lumped together and talked about in such vague generality.
Fair enough.
That’s not quite the same thing as being self-referential (or having a relatively small/simplified vocabulary
Good point. I screwed up and used the term “self-referential” when I probably should have said “self-similar” (I read Douglas Hofstadter too long ago!)
I think you understood what I meant, but just to correct myself: I was referring to the way in which those various musicians lift cues from their own work, shift them around, and refer to them in their own work, which may serve to heighten the audience’s sense of familiarity and sense that there is a structure there. I also assume that is subliminal.
Although, when I say “subliminal” there are crash dive sirens going off in my brain. I don’t think I am convinced that there is a divide between conscious/unconscious – certainly not in the Freudian sense (you already know what I think of Freud).
Why does repetition happen in music? I don’t exactly know. Some people are looking for symmetry in what they create, others want to evoke memories, other cases may just come down to historical/cultural influences which could be totally outside of any consious process of deliberation…. We could speculate all day (or for the rest of our lives) on these “why” questions, and it wouldn’t get us very far.
Fair enough. I agree that it’s much more complicated than I was trying to make it seem.
If I flip a coin over and over, it will be a random sequence, yet I will see multiple heads and multiple tails: repetition strikes again!
True. And Brian Eno has done some interesting stuff with generating ‘synthetic music’ (is there a difference between algorithmic and PRNG-created music and boredom and heroin-created music?) They are both shifting chunks of sound up and down. Brian Eno’s stuff sounds familiar to itself – what I’ve heard of it – because it’s permuting fragments of sounds. Ultimately we could boil that down to coin-tosses.
Presumably, we’re pretty good at noticing these “unlikely” things and attributing agency/intentionality to them. It’s the design argument for theism, if you like. People see lots of life, and they think God wanted life. They see lots of rocks, and they think God wanted rocks. (Or they should, if they were being consistent… but they mostly don’t pay much attention to rocks.) They see lots of crap on television, and they think God (or somebody) wanted crap on television.
I’m guilty of thinking that way. God must have created the universe in order that there be lots of nifty-keen black holes. All of the other stuff was just an accidental side effect of the physics for making all the black holes.
consciousness razor@#13;
By our standards, Paris circa 1913 sounds to me like it was in a constant state of near-rioting, more or less, inside and outside of the concert halls and theaters. So the atmosphere during the Rite’s first performance may not have been all that exceptional.
Paris was the seat of a declining world empire in 1913. I assume that it was wilder and crazier than the Trump White House backstage.
However, it’s also true that it was undoubtedly a groundbreaking piece of new music, so there definitely was something be upset about … if being upset is the sort of thing you’ll do if you’re not very open to new experiences.
Isn’t that sort of the topic? Someone who comes, expecting to see The Firebird was going to find The Rite of Spring to be way outside of what they were expecting to match for. (I am vaguely reminded here of some musicians like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan who are pretty comfortable giving their fans what they don’t expect) Compare that to Ray Wylie Hubbard: “the first thing you gotta ask yourself in song-writing is ‘can I play this song for 45 years?'”
Go to Bayreuth and you should expect more or less ecstatic, quasi-religious veneration of Saint Wagner and an unquestioning attitude about the stupendous marvelousness of everything he made.
Yeah, I don’t get that.
By the way, did you ever encounter the story of when Nietzsche was so inspired by Wagner that he wrote a piece of music and played it for him. Wagner ran out of the room, laughing, with his handkerchief over his mouth and tears in his eyes. Nietzsche, naturally, decided that Wagner’s music wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Finally, to be a little fairer to Beethoven, I suspect his reputation for having a bad temper (or Mozart’s for being something of a petulant child) is probably in part because he was putting up with all sorts of unhinged asshattery among his audiences, performers, critics, and so forth. It’s worth pointing out that we know an incredible amount about him, but we don’t know so much about (or neglect/ignore) the shit he had to put up with from all sorts of bad actors.
Well said.
I always thought it was interesting that, during the huge kerfuffle about Bob Dylan going electric at the folk festival, and Pete Seeger was running around trying to get the power to the amps cut – nobody seems to have stopped to ask, “hey, is the music any good?”
Kelley’s books are perennial favorites on my gifting-list because I think a lot of us are raised with the “hey, Beethoven is great” meme, but what is greatness in a musician? As soon as we ask that question, we have to realize that Beethoven was also responsive for finance and logistics not just the music.
Some of today’s musicians, I consider to be mostly performers – they have songs written for them, stage and lighting designers, business managers, etc. In some imagined world, being able to do all those things would make a musician better, but I don’t think that’s really the case. On the other hand, I find it extra awesome to learn that Beethoven didn’t have a massive support operation (www.ludwigvan.com) and a PR agency, and managed to produce what he did with what would be a bit more than a garage operation today.
Patrick Slattery@#15:
Apparently the sword was too heavy though because they soon came back and asked for an aluminum version instead. The toolmaker made a new lightweight sword and swapped them out and kept the “Real Excalibur” on the wall.
When people set out to make their first swords, they often make them much too heavy, since they’re concerned that they not break. But to a swordsman, a sword is a consumable and it’s only got to last for the coming fight. If the blade is too heavy, there’s no fight after that one.
It must have been amazing to see that thing hanging there. I listen to Adam Savage’s podcast, often, and am always seriously envious when he describes being able to visit WETA or whoever, and see the props. A lot of the props are made with the same love and attention as the “real” thing.
And now for some reason I am thinking of the story in which a special effects ray gun maker for Hollywood gets in an arms race with himself, during the course of a series of movies. The arms race ends when he actually makes some kind of working disintegration-ray…
Reginald Selkirk@#13:
Do you remember back in the 1990s or so, when P. Duddy – or whatever he called himself – would put brief samples from other songs at the start of his own? I thought the point was to remind you that you would rather be listening to something else, but perhaps I misinterpreted…
I honestly think that’s what’s going on. You hear some sampled-in riff and it gives you a feeling of comfortable recognition.
sonofrojblake@#12:
But twice in the film I experienced a double stab of this – once when they played just an echo of the 1989 Keaton Batman theme, and once when they played just a stab of the ’78 Reeve Superman theme. I had the pleasant shock of realisation, immediately followed by a stab of self-hatred for being so easily manipulated, then a little follow-up of disdain for the cynicism of the makers. Interesting.
Exactly!
Well, if you really want to have those buttons mashed, you should see Ready Player One.
I caught myself choking up a bit when the ${deleted} fell into the flames, and when Daito took on ${baddie} with his ${awesome} transform. And the whole time I was going, “Arrgggh! Spielberg is playing me like a noob!” I felt so debased.
Yes, this does remind me of the Trump-speak.
Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vpLpZydGx4 is a video of one of Latvia’s most famous preachers, Lutheran Archbishop Jānis Vanags. He’s talking the usual religious crap here, so never mind not understanding what he says. Just pay attention to his manner of speaking, the calm and soothing tone of voice, lack of hand gestures. This is how Latvian preachers talk during sermons.
When I watched Marjoe, I experienced a bit of a culture shock. I hadn’t previously seen this kind of sermons. I was used to Latvian sermons that make you sleepy, and all this running around and screaming in American sermons seemed very unusual for me.
I suspect that our perception of taste also depends on what we are used to. Personally, I really dislike American junk food (burgers, potato chips, soft drinks, etc.). I hadn’t eaten any of it as a child (my mother cooked real food for me), and the first time I tried this stuff I was already pretty old. For me it seemed like there was too much salt, too strong and unnatural artificial flavors and too many spices in general.
Sugar and salt and fatty foods work on me just like on anybody else (after all, our perception of taste seems to have evolved to make us like this stuff), but my perception of what constitutes “too much salt” seems to have been influenced by my mother’s cooking and the fact that she usually used little salt and spices. There’s no such thing as “too much sugar” for me though. I love sugar.