The world around us is about repetition, day after day, our lives repeat themselves, year after year, seasons repeat themselves, we are used to cycles and we like them. I even met people who left Los Angeles just because they weren’t happy with the lack of seasons… when the year is an eternal summer, where is the cycle and the repetition? I have more than once complained about certain music being too repetitive, ‘Music is about repetition’ answered me Iman a long time ago. Yes, he was right, and this new study demonstrates it even more. Dr. Elizabeth Margulis , associate Professor at Peabody Conservatory of Music at Columbia University decided to do a simple experiment using the music of Luciano Berio, a classic composers of the 20th century. She modified an excerpt of Sequenza IXa for clarinet, and if you aren’t familiar with Berio’s music (as I was) let’s just say that my cat was immediately intrigued when I played it , and jumped on my computer to see if there wasn’t something hidden behind it,…and my cat listens to all kinds of music. This is one of the least repetitive music you can hear, a sort of labyrinthine and experimental exploration that your mind can’t really make sense of.
Knowing that music is very repetitive, Margulis took this Berio’s piece and randomly looped it, then asked lots of people to choose between the two excerpts, the original one and the newly modified one: ‘They reported enjoying the excerpts that had repetition more,’ said Margulis to NPR which is reporting about the story. ‘They reported finding them more interesting, and — most surprising to me — they reported them as more likely to have been crafted by a human artist, rather than randomly generated by a computer.’ And she concluded it was all because of the repetition created: ‘Musical repetitiveness isn’t really an idiosyncratic feature of music that’s arisen over the past few hundred years in the West’, she said, ‘It seems to be a cultural universal. Not only does every known human culture make music, but also, every known human culture makes music [in which] repetition is a defining element.’
Repetition is simply comforting, reassuring and familiar, whereas new things are on the contrary often perceived as scary and not pleasant. Have you noticed that it takes a while to get used to a song, but once you are familiar with it, you may like the song more and more at each listening? It ‘grows on us’ we say, and this is exactly what Margulis is talking about: ‘Let’s say you’ve heard a little tune before, but you don’t even know that you’ve heard it, and then you hear it again. The second time you hear it you know what to expect to a certain extent, even if you don’t know you know. You are just better able to handle that sequence of sounds. And what it seems like [your mind is saying] is just, ‘Oh I like this! This is a good tune!’ But that’s a misattribution.’
In fact we recognize something that has become familiar and we like it. And this phenomenon is true for anything in life, the repetitive exposure to something makes it more likeable. But Margulis even goes further, not only the repetition is more enjoyable but it may also allow us to shift our experience of the reality around us.
I would also say it all make sense in evolutionary terms, with repetition comes patterns and does our brain love patterns! We are constantly looking for them. However, doesn’t a very repetitive song become annoying after a while? At what point repetition is too much repetition? We also like to be surprised in music, and I suppose that the perfect song manages to balance the right amount of repetitive and innovative parts.
