Flipping through my daily news and culture readings, I came across this article describing various implementations of repetition and studies indicating that repetition responds better with the human mind in a variety of ways:
I thought this excerpt was especially interesting:
Quote:
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. 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. The listeners in the study were college undergraduates with no special training or experience in contemporary art music.
Interesting thread, I know there is the another one but it's old and nobody is going to watch it anymore.
I think there is a difference between repetition and progression or modularity.
If something repeats, but something else changes, or is going to change, then that piece of music can be good. I say CAN, because it depends from other things, but if you don't like it, that's not because of repetition, as it's not repetition, technically. Think about minimalism for example.
If a thing repeats the same and the same for some minutes, without changing anything, then that's repetitive. You may like it anyway, but it's an exception, I mean that's because you love sooo much that thing so you can listen to it about 100 times without getting tired of it. But that's a subjective thing, and then you must admit that's repetitive, even if you like it.
Psychologically the average person is inclined to like music that's say 60 to 80% predictable or so, which would imply repetition. Given what's popular on the radio I'm hardly surprised the participants chose the altered versions of music.
What I do know however is that you can like most music albums simply by listening to them over and over. Repetition in Music is good in this case.
I believe that has more to do with familiarity than repetition. If you heard something that was completely out of the normal naturally you wouldn't enjoy it. Most people simply aren't open minded about what they listen to and prefer to hold on to what they know.
Anyway repetition is great and really undervalued in music I feel. Heres one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever and it uses repetition perfectly.
Well science does state that certain chord progressions are more pleasant to the ear, hence the repetition of chord patterns in popular music. Vsauce did an interesting video on this. Link
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