When it comes to music:
[O]ver 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.
Alexis Madrigal’s takeaway:
[Elizabeth Hellmuth] Margulis’ essay takes a fascinating turn to explain what it is about repetition that makes it so key to music. The secret, the evidence suggests, is that listening to music is an active process: We’re making the music in our heads as the sounds play our brains.
The Dish 