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Musical limitations + The brain damage that hides half the world

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Musicians Are Wired to Steal Each Other's Work: The rules of Western music limit originality in songs—and the human brain doesn’t want it, anyway
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...sm/499985/

EXCERPT: [...] It’s precisely for this reason that many examples of pop-music plagiarism are merely testaments to our litigious society. The cases are brought because there’s money to be made (especially by lawyers), not because anyone has done anything beyond the pale. Sure, artists deserve property rights like the rest of us, and if your song is blatantly stolen for profit then you deserve compensation. But given the narrow constraints of harmonic and melodic composition, “stolen” in the context of music plagiarism ought to mean more than “sounds like.”

What's more, such charges may also neglect basic truths about what it takes to write a popular piece of music. In short, no one gets famous purely because of their musical originality, and often fame depends on the relative lack of it. In the 1980s, the psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, of the University of California, Davis, measured the “originality” of the melodic themes of several famous classical composers. He analyzed the pitch steps between successive pairs of notes for just the first six notes of their melodies, and compared these against the statistical averages for all such themes in the corresponding era. The greater the departure from the average, the more original the fragment of tune was deemed to be.
Experimentation is essential; music would ossify without it.

Simonton found that the popularity of a composition—judged from how often the works have been performed—initially increased with this measure of originality, but then did the opposite. People like a touch of freshness, but are less keen on melodies that depart too much from what they’ve heard before.

Simonton’s work has recently been extended by Richard Hass, who used more sophisticated methods for measuring melodic originality, which take into account factors such as shifting overall trends in compositional style over time (the influence of the “Zeitgeist,” you might say). Applying these to 553 American songs written between 1900 and 1960—the era often said to have produced the Great American Songbook—he found that the relationship between fame and originality is rather complicated and genre-dependent. All the same, the data confirmed the notion that if you’re too original, you’ll probably be writing for a rather small audience. “In some ways,” Hass says, “to be successful as a songwriter, you have to utilize elements of existing music.”

Experimentation is essential; music would ossify without it. But commercial success inevitably rides on the back of others’ ideas. And there’s no shame in that....



The Brain Damage That Hides Half the World
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ct/500000/

EXCERPT: [...] He suffered from a syndrome called hemispatial neglect. No matter how hard he was pressed to try, he had no concept of the left side of space. I wish we had tried a few more experiments on Mr. X. The more you dig into the neglect syndrome, the more you see the seams in the mind. In many patients, if you give them the same kind of task such as cancelling lines on a page, but the lines are drawn on a wall a couple of yards away and the patient is given a laser pointer, the neglect goes away. The patient can process both sides of the wall perfectly, just not on a piece of paper in front of them.

Even more bizarre, if you give the same person a long stick instead of a laser pointer, the neglect comes back. They touch the distant targets on the wall with the stick, but they ignore the targets on the left side of the wall. Laser pointer, no problem. Stick, the left side of space disappears.

Results like this show that the brain breaks space into at least two parts: the space of things you can reach with your hands or a hand-held tool, and the space too far away to reach. In some patients, the reaching and tool-using space is damaged and the neglect is limited to it. In other patients, only the distant, unreachable space is affected. Some patients suffer both. Our Mr. X probably had a neglect limited to the near space, since he was able to navigate quite well walking around.

One of the most beautiful and revealing experiments on neglect showed that it is not just about the world around you, whether near or distant, but also about the world inside your imagination. The study involved patients whose far space was affected. If you ask one of those patients to close his eyes and imagine standing at the north end of a familiar city square, he can describe the square from memory. But he’ll list only the buildings on his right side, without noticing that he’s given an incomplete account....
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