https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bHsaAPWt0RA
How do you know where one song ends and another begins? And I’m thinking about the B side of Abbey Road, which I think is… Well, I’m a great fan of that along with millions of other people, not that that makes me special, but… It is an agglomeration of a bunch of song fragments. And yet it works brilliantly. It’s brilliant. And you can listen to it over and over. And you wish the songs would go on longer, but they don’t. And that’s interesting too, because it’s tantalizing. It doesn’t fully satiate you. It leaves you wanting more. And that’s somehow even more satisfying than being beat over the head with the same thing again and again. How is it that we have a sense of what constitutes a song in its entirety, and know that one song is different than another? The key makes a difference. What’s crucial? Yeah, well, so you mentioned the B side of Abbey Road, which is a great example. That’s an amazing achievement on multiple different levels. There’s an earlier example of that with The Beatles, which is the song A Day in the Life, which is similar in the sense that it consists of a series of fragments where the level of predictability in that song is extraordinarily low. Right. McCartney did that with Uncle Albert too. That’s right. Yeah. It’s an exceptionally strange song in the sense that you have absolutely no way of determining what the next section is going to be like on any level. It’s totally unpredictable. It’s almost like a collage in a sense. But it works and it has a kind of incredible cohesiveness to it. And you might wonder, where does that cohesiveness come from? So there has to be some kind of higher level framework that ties the whole thing together. So there’s a few things that can do that. So one of them is the expressive context. So what is the expressive thrust of the song? So you can have enormous stylistic shifts within a song. But as long as there’s some kind of a cohesiveness to the aesthetic or expressive project of the piece, that can still work. The other thing is you figure out fairly quickly when you’re listening to that track, or indeed to the B side of Abbey Road, that predictability is going to be low. Unpredictability is going to be a feature of the song. You figure that out very quickly. So that then starts to become paradoxically one of your expectations. So then the game becomes, what is the precise way in which this unpredictability is going to be manifested? When am I going to be surprised? How long is this fragment going to go on? OK. So that’s an unbelievably important point. Now imagine something unpredictable happens to you. So let’s say you wake up this morning and tomorrow morning and there’s a little your side aches. OK. So now your nervous system has a major problem because that could be nothing or it could kill you. And so and the probability that it will kill you is not zero. And so you might ask yourself, well, why shouldn’t you just run off to the emergency ward instantly every time something minor happens to you? And I’ve thought about this for a long time, trying to figure out what it means that something is differentially unpredictable. So imagine that you have a representation of the world and that representation enables you to get from one place to another. And the farther there are things that you rely on as constants within that map. So let’s say you’re married to someone and you’re thinking about your future. You’ve got your future mapped out and you assume the presence of your marital partner as a constant. And then you get divorced or they die because a tremendous number of your plans or because a huge proportion of your map is dependent on the fact that you’re married. And so the more something is the more unpredictable something is, the more it disrupts in potential when it makes itself manifest. And sometimes you have to guess at that, but that’s basically the issue. And your nervous system, it’s more complicated than that too, because you’re nervous. So if the question is how do you know if you’re going to be able to do that? And you’re nervous because you’re going to be able to do it. So if the question is how upset should you get when something unexpected happens? The answer is you have to guess and you have to calibrate that a variety of ways. So your trait neuroticism calibrates that. So people who are low in neuroticism prepare for an emergency much less proportionately for every degree of uncertainty. And sometimes they’re wrong. So maybe if you’re really low in neuroticism, you’re not anxious, you’re not depressed, you’re not shame ridden, you’re not guilty, etc. But if you have a small ache in your side, you’ll go to the hospital and now and then that stops you from dying of cancer. Okay, so neuroticism is one and your nervous system is built as a guess. Some people assume the world is more dangerous and some people assume it’s less dangerous and that’s built right in. Your position in the dominance hierarchy or in the competence hierarchy also matters. So as you move up a hierarchy, your brain produces more serotonin and that dampens down the degree to which you respond physiologically to every unit of threat. And that’s because the higher you are in a competence hierarchy, so the more successful you are, the less dangerous the world actually is because you have more resources around you. So if you’re like barely clinging on to the edge of the world, any stressor can knock you over the edge. So okay, so back to the unexpected in music. I presume there’s a hierarchy of rules that’s sort of implicit in every song and also in the corpus of songs that you’re familiar with as a listener. And the more all the songs you know depend on the integrity of that rule, the more dissonant or unexpected the transition that violates those rules is. That’s exactly right. That’s a very, very crucial point because these things are determined contextually. And sometimes the context is a broader stylistic one attached to a particular genre. Right. A genre tells you a bunch of things you can’t do as well as a bunch of things you can do. And you might think if you’re thinking romantically and not too clearly that the fewer limitations on you, the better. You’d have more freedom with fewer limitations. But paradoxically, that’s not exactly right. And that’s really demonstrated in music because the fact that there are genres seems to increase the range of possible productions rather than decreasing them. You know, so if you’re writing a country song, well there’s a bunch of things you can’t do before it becomes a rock song or a blues song. Although you can play with the borders in an interesting way. But if those limitations weren’t there, well you wouldn’t have that genre. And some people might think that’s good in relationship to country music. But there’s great country music just like there’s great music of all genres. And so that seems to me to be associated with a point that we made earlier about training of the artistic temperament. Which is that you have to go through an apprenticeship and discipline yourself before you can become free. And that’s a good way. I want to bang this point home to some degree because especially for people who are out there who are young that are listening to this, you don’t want to be thinking that constraints are your enemy if you’re a creative artist. They’re not your enemy. Routine isn’t your enemy. Discipline isn’t your enemy. Genres aren’t your enemy. You can push against those constraints and you should. But you want to push against them with respect. Because if the constraints weren’t there, you wouldn’t have music. You’d just have noise. And you know, anybody can bang their fists on a piano. And there’s infinite ways of doing that. But none of them are interesting. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And on one level, I mean, you could take it a step farther and say that there’s actually very little freedom in creativity in a certain sense. Because we’re talking about genres. So the instant you say, I’m going to write an opera or a pop song or a jingle for a TV commercial, instantly there are all kinds of expectations attendant upon those forms. You can play with those to some extent, but you can’t completely violate them. If you want to make something that is meaningful enough to make something that’s capable of carrying meaning within that genre, there’s only so far you can really push it. So you come up against that very quickly. And then once you start, let’s say, developing a style as a composer, then that style has certain expectations attendant upon it as well. So you’re not actually that free. Now, I think one major difference between music being composed today and music being composed 300 years ago is that the stylistic parameters of a piece today are much more embedded within individual works, or let’s say within the style of an individual composer. They’re less sort of outsourced to the reigning genres or practices of the day.