An Even Tempered Life.

In a recent Ted Talk a mathematician chappy suggested our enjoyment of music depended on repartition and pattern, and to prove it created a non repeating pattern-less piece supposedly devoid of enjoyment. It didn’t prove his point, it was a little disjointed but most people according to the comments found pattern in it. He did though inadvertently make the reverse point, that our cognition is finely tuned to find and enjoy pattern even when mathematically it’s not there. He also overlooked the fact that all the notes in an even-tempered scale are strictly related by the ratio of 2 to the power n over 12 where n is the number of the note in the scale. Even the word recognition suggests we perceive by a process of finding some pre-existing cognitive pattern in what is presented. If we can’t it becomes noise or information of no value, an infinitely blurred picture. It then becomes intriguing that our cognition hovers between a reliance on structure and a disinterest in pattern-less noise and how we relate to the intermediate spectrum between the two. In one direction we are driven to find structure in apparent noise so that it ceases to be noise, and in the other we succumb to the comfort and eventual imprisonment of habitual patterns. It’s thus rare that we de-construct structure back into noise so that new structures can be found. De-construct a street full of parked cars and they become a mass of expensive mechanical litter, cholesterol choking the arteries of movement, the cherished stagnation of our love of movement. Things aren’t as they seem, they just seem to be.