Comment by Affric

Yep, I have come to believe that as complex adaptive systems made of complex adaptive systems the part of us that experience music do so through being able to predict new information.

If there is no ability to predict it’s random and just noise.

If there is no uncertainty and it’s just purely repetitive then there’s also no new information and it loses the music (see what happens with overplayed pre-recorded songs).

The sweet spot is when we can to some degree predict what’s coming and thus understand it to be information while not being sure of what’s coming so we get the reward of encoding it.

I think this works for pretty much all genres and contexts. Even listening to techno in a dark warehouse while off ones face: the altered state makes most things seem novel no matter how repetitive and your mind doesn’t tune the information out.

But that’s IMO why octave harmonies largely don’t work: the mind perceives no information in the pure octave, and so little joy is gained from it.