Originally published in https://ideafair.bearblog.dev/why-we-enjoy-music/

Why we enjoy music

10 Jan, 2021

Music and ML

I think the reason why we enjoy music can be explained in terms of Machine Learning (ML). Music can be seen as an audio signal that has multiple levels of patterns in it. When we listen to music our brain is trying to learn and predict this pattern. We enjoy music when the brain is finally successful at this task. There must be some innate reward function for being able to learn and predict patterns successfully in our brain.

Confidence and Accuracy

To go bit deeper into when exactly we enjoy music the most, we can look at our brain's confidence & accuracy of the music prediction. At first both the confidence and accuracy are low, but after listening to the tune several times our accuracy increases. At this point we are able to predict with higher accuracy, but the confidence is still low. This is my guess when the enjoyment is highest as we are building confidence by being able to predict accurately. After sometime though the confidence is fully built up, so listening to the tune too many times is not enjoyable.

Levels of complexity

When we listen to the same music multiple times, we can start appreciating the finer details. Thus music or any other data source that has multiple levels of complexity is more interesting. One can read about this further in the (Godel Escher Bach book)[https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567]. Thus it is not enough to have a regular pattern, the patterns should slowly increase in complexity. Creating new combinations from existing patterns adds more flavor to the music.

Ultimate music

Based on this we can imagine how one could create music that would give us the greatest enjoyment. One day perhaps someone could use ML to create an algorithm that would create a personalized music that keeps increasing in complexity. The music would start simple and whenever we start feeling it is repetitive it adds new complexity by mixing older tunes. This can be seen as a form of Curriculum learning. This concept need not be limited to music, we can apply the same principle to visual arts, games etc. Humans are pattern seeking machine and we enjoy learning new patterns.