Strange Loops

There’s a concept in cognitive science called “Strange Loops”. This is the idea that any system of sufficient complexity can’t help but become self-referential in a way that precludes making absolute statements about the system in logically airtight ways. I’m thinking about this as sort of a double entendre in relation to making music.

Music consists of some universal ideas. One is relationships between sounds. One is relationships between rhythm. This could be phrased better, but I want to keep going on this thought exercise. One single note in isolation is just a sound. A note evolving over time can be music.

There is an idea that I like to reference that is “quantity has a quality all it’s own”. This means that in isolation a single idea or icon is relatively insignificant or devoid of meaning, but a comparatively large number or arrangement of the same thing is a whole new idea or work of art.

This plays into music perfectly where a single note becomes a profound moving experience when repeated in a particular way. This may be why meditation can be so profound. One minute of silence is annoying but 45 minutes is life changing. How is that possible?

The art of electronic music and music writ large is based on repetition. It’s easy to rely on a crutch that is fancy and interesting tones, but the reality is that music has been made by humans before any sort of instruments were really made. Banging rocks or tree stumps or just making sounds with the mouth or body form the very start of human musical expression. So there must be more to it than just sounds.

Nowhere is the more evident in modern music than electronic music. The advent of the synthesizer meant the stripping down of musical tones to basic waveforms like sine waves and triangle waves. How could this possibly make interesting music?

It turns out that the key is in all of human musical achievement to date. We are hard wired to match patterns. Music plays on this tendency to induce feelings of surprise or contentment. Consonance and dissonance, regularity vs non-regularity.

Any beginning electronic musician will realize that while we like patterns and are comforted by them we also get bored and annoyed by repetition. The trick is to find a balance. It turns out that it doesn’t take much. The more regular a pattern is the more we squint to find the differences, the more we anticipate change. The difference between a beginner and a pro is the knowledge of when to move and change and when to hold steady.

I say all of this because I’ve been working again with sample based music. I usually like to work with some live electronic instruments which provide some natural level of variability provided from the mere choice of instrumentation. When looping the same samples over and over we need to pay attention to the variations ourselves. Whether by articulation, sample choice or effects. It’s trickier to emulate than it would first seem. Something about the natural playing styles and subconscious articulations require dedicated study to even perceive.

Listening to a loop again and again both numb us and deepen our awareness. It’s like meditation. However it’s easy to get stuck in a loop (pun intended). When to move on? When to drill in? Sometimes when listening to a loop over and over we get stuck and sometimes we are set free.