Why repetition can turn almost anything into music
Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again? Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains.
Evidence has been accumulating that something more than the mere exposure effect governs the special role of repetition in music.
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.
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.
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.
A separate study in my lab tested whether repetition could also make snippets of music sound more musical.
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.
Originally published at Cogly.
