For example, if I played a song really, really slowly. Say, one note per hour, I doubt people would be able to recognize it as music and have the same chemical, physical, and emotional response than if it were played “normally”. When does music become just sound and vice versa?
**Have there been any experiments on how slow music can be before we stop “feeling” the music?**
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I’ve listened to a song slowed down to 1% and been able to recognize it. Porter Robinson – Goodbye To A World. Oddly beautiful
There’s two kind of general rules about humans:
1) We really like identifying patterns, predicting patterns, and seeing those patterns repeat.
2) Once that happens, we get really bored of those patterns pretty quickly.
Music is, all the way through, an exercise in patterns. A beat is a pattern. The ratios of wavelengths in the notes to others are a pattern. Chord progressions are a pattern. Melody is a pattern. The structure of a song itself, e.g. verse to chorus, is a pattern.
This is how personal taste and “genres” of music and similar form. They form from the “stable” middle ground where your brain recognizes just enough of the pattern from other stuff it already likes, and can vaguely (but mostly correctly) predict where that pattern is going, but is not so similar to the other patterns it’s already heard to be bored with it. And this equilibrium changes with time depending on what you listen to, what you’re exposed to, your friends, your culture, etc.
But it is also where you get the breakdown in whether something sounds like “music” or not. If the pattern is so different than every other kind of music that we’ve ever heard, or if it’s too fast/too slow for us to even process that it’s a pattern at all, then we tend to say “that’s not music, that’s just noise.”
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