While music can be a hard thing to define, I like the simple definition of ‘organised sound’, because it suggests a structure, the presence of patterns and regularity, a means of forming expectations.
Whether it’s complex jazz or a simple children’s melody, there is always some structure involved. A rhythm, a phrase, or a key — an element that for the keen mind can be found, followed, and forecast.
Until it can’t. Until the direction changes and your prediction is broken, and the mind scrambles to grasp the new structure.
That’s what keeps it interesting, and I’d argue it’s the most significant element in our aesthetic enjoyment of music — the push and pull of familiarity and novelty, of uncertainty and resolution.
This fits in well with a prominent theory of cognition called ‘predictive coding’. Predictions and prediction errors are what the brain deals in, and it’s what makes music pleasurable.
The Brain as a Prediction Engine
The theory goes back at least at least as far as the 1860s, with the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and his idea of unconscious inference.
“He was […] interested in theories of perception and argued that we perceive the world only thanks to a kind of unconscious reasoning or…
