Music to delight even JL

Some people like hot sauce on their eggs, some don't. It's meaningless.

I think music and dancing evolved as tribal bonding mechanisms, which were effective only when local. Music isn't local any more. It's a mass-produced mass-marketed industrial product, mostly manufactured by machines.

JL very likely has "amusia" - a congenital brain defect. Like being born blind or deaf or with no taste buds.

Such folk cannot comment to what they simply cannot perceive. Idiotic to even try.

..... Phil

Music is a form of recreational mathematics. Some types of music are closer to that discipline than others:

To the untrained ear it sounds like cats on a piano but this piece is constructed in a very formalized way - nothing about it is arbitrary.

It seems likely that music and language exploit some of the same processing paths in the brain. A decade or so ago I sat through a series of high prestige academic lectures on the subject.

Music isn't any kind of industrial product - some of it may be mass-marketed, but it is all generated by human beings. Quite a lot of pop music is derived from higher-quality music composed for more discriminating audience - one composer of popular music took on a rush job, and when it was suggested that meeting the time scale was going to take a lot out of him, he replied that it was going to take a lot more out of Bach and Brahms ...

It's not obvious quite what's missing from John Larkin's brain that stops him from enjoying music. but clearly there is something missing. It's probably not important, but it isn't meaningless. My wife - who is a very clever woman - doesn't do face recognition (which probably frees up a lot of her brain to be clever about other stuff) and I don't do office politics.

What does music mean, other than some people enjoy it?

Maybe addiction to music is the defect. What is its virtue? [1]

I guess most of my brain is devoted to designing electronics. If that's at the expense of spending time and money on music or heroin or collectable figurines, I have no complaints.

Most people pay for pleasures like music. Designing electronics is great fun, but you get paid.

I can certainly see the effects of music and TV and drugs on people. Since I don't indulge in them, I can probably see the effects more objectively than the addicts.

That's really silly.

It *is* an arbitrary pleasure. If you enjoy it, fine, but it has no fundamantal purpose. Different cultures have very different ideas of what sounds good; I guess they have different training.

Dogs are trained. Ideally, people think.

If you take the "no fundamental purpose" argument far enough then you become a Romanian existential philosopher:

I like working on scale miniatures of trains that were scrapped decades ago, if you want to talk about activities with no real practical value.

It's a form of "art" I guess and one could define an artist as a type of engineer only designs and builds things with no fundamental purpose.

It's repetitive, but not totally repetitive. "Theme and variation".

Listening to music and reacting to music by dancing are social activities.

Humans are a lot more of a social animal than most mammals We hung around in larger groups than most mammals before we invented cities.

Not that John Larkin seems to design electronics - what he describes doing looks more like tinkering with existing circuits to come up with more useful variations, which is more Darwinian evolution than design.

Granting your taste - as exhibited in the ideas you collect and present here - isn't great, you shouldn't.

You don't always get paid more if you do it better. Claiming that what you have "designed" is insanely good does seem to be a more reliable way of getting a lot of money for it.

Quite a few people don't have the first idea of what might constitute good electronic design - Cursitor Doom clearly doesn't - but it doesn't stop them thinking that they can identify good electronic design.

But you don't know what is actually creating the effect. People don't get addicted to music, so the analogy with drugs is simply silly.

Aesop had a fable about that.

Wrong.

"Fundamental purpose" implies that music was intelligently designed. In reality, it seems likely that the same brain structures that we need to make sense of human language pick up on the quasi-repetitive structures that most people can recognise in music, and have preferences between particular sorts of structures.

Different cultures have very different ideas of what sounds good; I guess they have different training.

Most people can see the sense in very foreign music. They aren't practiced in picking out what's being repeated and how the successive repetitions are being changed, but recognise it as music, rather than random noise.

People have to be trained to think in a useful way. John Larkin doesn't seem to have been as well trained as he should have been.

-----------------------

Berg is an acquired taste, but is clearly music to my ear.

But it won't if be you have congenital disabilities in that area.

...... Phil

I am glad I can enjoy both music and electronics.

What do we live for ? To live and enjoy life I think, for me. Why not have many things that we can enjoy for contrast ?

Of course! The more things one *can* enjoy, the likely more ENJOYABLE the life experience!

I'm told by folks who've had/survived Covid that eating was really strange -- without taste/smell, it boiled down to an exercise in *texture* appreciation. Imagine what it would be like to get only nourishment from food -- no enjoyment/pleasure!

Like looking at a painting and just seeing colors on canvas/paper.

Or, reading a novel and dismissing it as a fictional accounting of an nonexistent event.

Yet, you could look at a schematic representation of a particularly clever circuit and get an equivalent "rush". Or, a clever implementation of an algorithm. Imagine just seeing marks on a piece of paper in each of those cases.

Sad. REALLY sad. The mind and spirit *crave* being stimulated!

I totally agree!! I'm fortunate in that I immensely enjoy music, art, electronic design and such. Playing music was something of a compulsion at one time in my life. I suspect I love all dopamine agonists. It's the melody that I love. The lyrics generally don't impress me. There are exceptions. I've often wondered what the mechanism is that causes some music to move me to tears. I love my dogs. They make my heart smile.

FWIW, I googled "why do i enjoy music so much" and got a very interesting response. Falls inline with my thinking.

Maybe Mr. Larkin can just be told the Venetian Snares are a Top 100 band and it would be best to play this music in the office all the time - employees and clients love this stuff:

If he knows it's probably best for the dentist office to play light classical instead of the above on the PA independent of anyone telling him I'd say he's probably not completely music-autistic.

I knew a guy in college who had no sense of smell either from birth or most of his life, dude seemed to eat like a horse regardless and love every minute of it though granted he was a 19 y/o teenage male and tended to eat in accordance with that.

Guy would try just about anything really he wasn't terribly particular though fried chicken seemed to be a favorite, he couldn't experience all the flavors but the salt, fat, texture and "umami" of it he probably could and that was probably enough, particularly if those senses are heightened due to the absence of another.

Also he got to make a few bucks from time to time when someone forgot some old takeout in the lounge fridge and it got rotten, too rank for anyone else to go near without gagging but he happily cleaned it out in a jiffy not a problem, and this was a service he was paid for