Repetition defines music
Musical repetition has become a repeating theme of this blog. Seems appropriate, right? This post looks at a book by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, called On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind. It investigates the reasons why we love repetition in music. You can also read long excerpts at Aeon Magazine.
Here's the nub of Margulis' argument:
The simple act of repetition can serve as a quasi-magical agent of musicalisation. Instead of asking: ‘What is music?’ we might have an easier time asking: ‘What do we hear as music?’ And a remarkably large part of the answer appears to be: ‘I know it when I hear it again.’
Margulis' writing is the first place I've encountered the idea that repetition is music's most basic defining quality. I think she's right.
Cultures all over the world make repetitive music. The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois counts repetitiveness among the few musical universals known to characterise music the world over. Hit songs on American radio often feature a chorus that plays several times, and people listen to these already repetitive songs many times. The musicologist David Huron at Ohio State University estimates that, during more than 90 per cent of the time spent listening to music, people are actually hearing passages that they’ve listened to before. The play counter in iTunes reveals just how frequently we listen to our favourite tracks. And if that’s not enough, tunes that get stuck in our heads seem to loop again and again. In short, repetition is a startlingly prevalent feature of music, real and imagined.
Not only is repetition extraordinarily prevalent, but you can make non-musical sounds musical just by repeating them.
The psychologist Diana Deutsch, at the University of California, San Diego, discovered a particularly powerful example – the speech-to-song illusion. The illusion begins with an ordinary spoken utterance, the sentence ‘The sounds as they appear to you are not only different from those that are really present, but they sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible.’ Next, one part of this utterance – just a few words – is looped several times. Finally, the original recording is represented in its entirety, as a spoken utterance. When the listener reaches the phrase that was looped, it seems as if the speaker has broken into song, Disney-style.
The speech-to-sound illusion, discovered by Diana Deutsch, UC San Diego. To experience the illusion, play the two recordings in sequence.
https://soundcloud.com/aeon-magazine/sound-demo-1
https://soundcloud.com/aeon-magazine/sound-demo-2
Credit: Diana Deutsch
Like Brian Eno says: "Repetition is a form of change."
The speech-to-song illusion reveals that the exact same sequence of sounds can seem either like speech or like music, depending only on whether it has been repeated. Repetition can actually shift your perceptual circuitry such that the segment of sound is heard as music: not thought about as similar to music, or contemplated in reference to music, but actually experienced as if the words were being sung.
The speech-to-song illusion suggests something about the very nature of music: that it's a quality not of the sounds themselves, but of a particular method our brain uses to attend to sounds.
The ‘musicalisation’ shifts your attention from the meaning of the words to the contour of the passage (the patterns of high and low pitches) and its rhythms (the patterns of short and long durations), and even invites you to hum or tap along with it. In fact, part of what it means to listen to something musically is to participate imaginatively.
That is as good a definition of music as I've ever come across.
Now here's a philosophical question:
Can music exist without repetition? Well, music is not a natural object and composers are free to flout any tendency that it seems to exhibit. Indeed, over the past century, a number of composers expressly began to avoid repetitiveness in their work.
It should be no mystery that such music is heard by most people (including me) as uniformly awful.
In a recent study at the Music Cognition lab, we played people samples of this sort of music, written by such renowned 20th-century composers as Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter. Unbeknownst to the participants, some of these samples had been digitally altered. Segments of these excerpts, chosen only for convenience and not for aesthetic effect, had been extracted and reinserted. These altered excerpts differed from the original excerpts only in that they featured repetition.
The altered excerpts should have been fairly cringeworthy; after all, the originals were written by some of the most celebrated composers of recent times, and the altered versions were spliced together without regard to aesthetic effect. But listeners in the study consistently rated the altered excerpts as more enjoyable, more interesting, and – most tellingly – more likely to have been composed by a human artist rather than randomly generated by a computer.
There's so much here. I have never understood the prestige attached to Berio and Carter. I find their music to be plenty cringeworthy to begin with. I'm not at all surprised that adding some repetition to it actually makes it more tolerable.
The central message of Margulis' research is that repetition imbues sounds with meaning.
Repetition serves as a handprint of human intent. A phrase that might have sounded arbitrary the first time might come to sound purposefully shaped and communicative the second.
That phrase, "a handprint of human intent," is a really good one. And how, exactly, does repetition imbue sounds with meaning?
Ask an indulgent friend to pick a word – lollipop, for example – and keep saying it to you for a couple minutes. You will gradually experience a curious detachment between the sounds and their meaning. This is the semantic satiation effect, documented more than 100 years ago. As the word’s meaning becomes less and less accessible, aspects of the sound become oddly salient – idiosyncrasies of pronunciation, the repetition of the letter l, the abrupt end of the last syllable, for example. The simple act of repetition makes a new way of listening possible, a more direct confrontation with the sensory attributes of the word itself.
This is another terrific potential definition of music: "Confrontation with the sensory attributes of sound."
Anthropologists might feel that they are on familiar ground here, because it is now understood that rituals – by which I mean stereotyped sequences of actions, such as the ceremonial washing of a bowl – also harness the power of repetition to concentrate the mind on immediate sensory details rather than broader practicalities. In the case of the bowl-washing, for example, the repetition makes it clear that the washing gestures aren’t meant merely to serve a practical end, such as making the bowl clean, but should rather serve as a locus of attention in themselves.
It's no coincidence that music and ritual work together so closely all over the world.
[T]he repetition of gestures makes it harder and harder to resist imaginatively modelling them, feeling how it might be to move your own hand in the same way. This is precisely the way that repetition in music works to make the nuanced, expressive elements of the sound increasingly available, and to make a participatory tendency – a tendency to move or sing along – more irresistible.
Even involuntary repetition, quite against our own musical preferences, is powerful. This is why music that we hate but that we’ve heard again and again can sometimes engage us unwillingly; why we can find ourselves on the bus enthusiastically grooving along until we realise that we’re actually listening to We Built This City by Starship.
And when we do want bits of speech to be tightly bound in this way – if we’re memorising a list of the presidents of the United States, for example – we might set it to music, and we might repeat it.
We've all unconsciously composed little melodies to help ourselves memorize something. You used to see it with phone numbers, back when people had to know phone numbers. In preliterate societies, music is the best method for storing and conveying complex stories and information.
Margulis' ideas are almost flawless, but I need to dispute one of her assertions:
It’s also worth pointing out that there are many aspects of music not illuminated by repetition. It might be possible to transform speech into song, but a single bowed note on a violin can also sound unambiguously musical without any special assistance.
As a matter of fact, the musical nature of a single bowed note on a violin is further proof of the intrinsically repetitive nature of musical sound. Any pitched sound is really just a very fast rhythm. If you play a series of clicks and speed it up gradually, at around twenty clicks per second, you stop hearing them as individual events. Instead, you experience a single stream of clicks, a phenomenon known as "event fusion." If you speed up the click stream a little more, you begin to hear a distinct pitch. Perceptually speaking, "pitch" is just our sensation of regular rhythms whose tempos are faster than the threshold for event fusion. At 440 clicks per second, your click stream is a concert A. Your voice produces pitched sounds by rhythmically flapping ("clicking") your vocal folds. Here's a video of what this looks like; be warned that it is not for the squeamish.
Another statement of Margulis' that I want to correct:
Repetition can’t explain why a minor chord sounds dark or a diminished chord sounds sinister.
This is actually where the explanatory power of rhythm shines brightest. If a single pitch is a very fast rhythm, then a chord is a very fast polyrhythm. A perfect fifth is a three against two polyrhythm, also known as hemiola. The ratios of beats comprising minor and diminished chords are more complex and difficult to parse, which in our culture we associate with darkness or evil.
Margulis is on firmer ground when she discusses the way that rhythm changes our passive hearing into active listening. Emphasis is mine:
[Repetition] captures sequencing circuitry that makes music feel like something you do rather than something you perceive. This sense of identification we have with music, of listening with it rather than to it, so definitional to what we think about as music, also owes a lot to repeated exposure.
Marc Sabatella says that we are all musicians. Some of us are listening musicians, and some are performing musicians. Repetition turns us all into listening musicians.
The stunning prevalence of repetition in music all over the world is no accident. Music didn’t acquire the property of repetitiveness because it’s less sophisticated than speech, and the 347 times that iTunes says you have listened to your favourite album isn’t evidence of some pathological compulsion – it’s just a crucial part of how music works its magic. Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as musical. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen. That experience of being played by the music is what creates a sense of shared subjectivity with the sound, and – when we unplug our earbuds, anyway – with each other, a transcendent connection that lasts at least as long as a favourite song.
The art of sample-based hip-hop relies on beatmakers' ability to find fragments within the linear stream of recorded music and bend them into unexpected loops.
Digital audio makes it possible for us to effortlessly and endlessly repeat segments of music ranging in length from short phrases to entire artists' catalogs. Not only do we love to listen to repetitive songs, we love to do so repeatedly. In Capturing Sound, Mark Katz points out that recording makes it possible to have precisely repeated listening experiences for the first time in history.
Live performances are unique, while recordings are repeatable… [A]ny orchestra can play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony many times; each performance, however, will necessarily be different.
Such repeated listening can't help but change our relationship to the art form of music in general.
For listeners, repetition raises expectations. This is true in live performance; once we’ve heard Beethoven’s Fifth in concert, we assume it will start with the same famous four notes the next time we hear it. But with recordings, we can also come to expect features that are unique to a particular performance—that a certain note will be out of tune, say. With sufficient repetition, listeners may normalize interpretive features of a performance or even mistakes, regarding them as integral not only to the performance but to the music. In other words, listeners may come to think of an interpretation as the work itself.
The repeatability of recorded sound has affected listeners’ expectations on a much broader scope as well. When the phonograph was invented, the goal for any recording was to simulate a live performance, to approach reality as closely as possible. Over the decades, expectations have changed. For many—perhaps most—listeners, music is now primarily a technologically mediated experience. Concerts must therefore live up to recordings. Given that live music had for millennia been the only type of music, it is amazing to see how quickly it has been supplanted as model and ideal.
The possibilities of repeated listening to recordings also has profound implications for music education. Cognitive scientists use the word "rehearsal" to describe the process by which the brain learns through repeated exposure to the same stimulus. As they like to say, neurons that fire together wire together. Repetitive music builds rehearsal in, making it more accessible and inclusive. Kirt Saville explores how looping can serve the music teacher in his paper, Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool.
I can’t overstate the value of using loops of actual songs played by actual musicians, as opposed to metronomes or fake-sounding MIDI tracks. The metronome demoralizes students quickly, and convenient though MIDI is, it doesn’t convey feeling and nuance. Study of the genuine article, with its groove and feeling intact, is a vastly richer and more engaging experience. Also, listening to music loops creates a trance-like, meditative feeling, as fans of repetitive electronic dance music will attest. This meditative state is most conducive to flow, and turns repeated drilling into a pleasurable act.
I'll close with a Prince quote I've already used here, and in many other places on this blog. It feels appropriate to repeat it:
There's joy in repetition There's joy in repetition There's joy in repetition There's joy in repetition There's joy in repetition There's joy in repetition
Words to live by. Words to live by. Words to live by. Words to live by.
Update: there's a lively discussion of this post happening on Synthtopia's Facebook page.