Here’s an interesting perspective on intuition

[gambler]

Just now, Leo Gura said:

Why do so many humans like such shitty music though???

They’re also hardwired for easy gratification? 

[Salvijus]

1 hour ago, RendHeaven said:

I once contemplated tonal harmony on psychedelics and I was completely baffled and floored when I realized that all combinations of sounds were equally beautiful. I directly tested this.

That's beautiful. I can relate to that perspective aswell. It's very nondual. 

[Leo Gura]

6 minutes ago, gambler said:

They’re also hardwired for easy gratification? 

The shittiness of it transcends any kind of easy gratification. 

More like mental illness.

It's like people who get botox lips and think it's beautiful. 

Edited 21 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Salvijus]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

What kind of music do aliens listen to?

Contemplate!

Probably something New Age lol. 

[Yimpa]

Just now, Salvijus said:

Probably something New Age lol. 

Nah

[Salvijus]

1 hour ago, Yimpa said:

Nah

Light language music 🎶 

[RendHeaven]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Why do so many humans like such shitty music though???

Enormous group-think.

Ungodly amounts of group-think haha.

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

What kind of music do aliens listen to?

Contemplate!

I'm going to give this a sincere shot off the cuff

But i'll need thousands more hours of solitude + 5meo to have a definitive answer (lol)

---

An alien consciousness would not differentiate between sound and other sense perceptions.

An alien consciousness would not arbitrarily find some tones more beautiful than others, unless it decreed so for the sake of more interesting holistic interplay.

An alien consciousness would spawn and discover aesthetics of music beyond all recognition - novel aesthetics spun out of thin air - and yet this new aesthetic will not be random. It would have an immaculate meta-balance that only the alien can appreciate. It strikes balance outside of the box which cannot be appreciated from within the box.

An alien consciousness does not need ears nor a body.

Therefore an alien consciousness "listening to music" = MIND reconfiguring itself to please itself spontaneously using original, never-before-woven aesthetics born of sonic frequencies that bleed into the rest of MIND in an incestuous, ouroboros-like manner. Striking an intelligent balance too majestic for a mere human to comprehend, being totally alone in its appreciation, it marvels at its magnitude and whimsy. The whole thing is more beautiful than anything it has ever witnessed, and yet it's a joke. Just another day for MIND.

Edited 18 hours ago by RendHeaven
my grammar sucks

[Leo Gura]

12 minutes ago, RendHeaven said:

Enormous group-think.

Ungodly amounts of group-think haha.

It's more than that though.

People like really weird stuff like trashy heavy metal, awful rap, punk, dubstep, etc.

Edited 21 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Salvijus]

@RendHeaven this is the bias of existence. 

 

[RendHeaven]

11 minutes ago, RendHeaven said:

Therefore an alien consciousness "listening to music" = MIND reconfiguring itself to please itself spontaneously using original, never-before-woven aesthetics born of sonic frequencies that bleed into the rest MIND in an incestuous, ouroboros-like manner. Striking an intelligent balance too majestic for a mere human to comprehend, being totally alone in its appreciation, it marvels at its magnitude and whimsy. The whole thing is more beautiful than anything it has ever witnessed, and yet it's a joke. Just another day for MIND.

To tie this into the rest of the conversation, I think the punchline would be that if a normal human managed to hear this "alien music" using his dualistic biases and biological ears, he would struggle to make any sense of it.

It would feel like ugly gibberish since it directly threatens his preferred human musical sensemaking.

That is, unless the human were clever enough to understand his own limits.

If the human were able to question his own ideas of beauty, he may be open to levels of beauty/truth/resonance/cognition beyond his current grasp.

[Leo Gura]

@RendHeaven But then is there such a thing as objectively bad/ugly music?

It's much easier to make a bad dish than a good one.

Edited 21 hours ago by Leo Gura

[RendHeaven]

5 minutes ago, Salvijus said:

@RendHeaven this is the bias of existence. 

This video is profound.

I'm not in any position to draw conclusions.

[RightHand]

10 minutes ago, Salvijus said:

@RendHeaven this is the bias of existence. 

 

Reality is infuriating. 

[Salvijus]

1 hour ago, RightHand said:

Reality is infuriating. 

Lol

 

[mmKay]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

I was actually thinking of getting into making music, although I have zero experience.

Having "great taste" and not even trying to create music is a sin. Band lab is all you need to tinker around. It's extremely intuitive ( guess we're on topic here ). You can begin with creating a beat that sounds cool or to you or just a little melody. Over time you piece things together and boom! It's way simpler than you imagine 

And AI makes it so easy to get cool vocals or raw ideas for you to tweak

https://www.bandlab.com/creation-features

Break free from the idea that songs need to be minutes long. 10 second music is still music.  

Edited 20 hours ago by mmKay

[AION]

44 minutes ago, Salvijus said:

@RendHeaven this is the bias of existence. 

 

The thoughts/words in your mind have the same effect on your body and surrounding. Let that sink in. Vibes are everything.

Edited 20 hours ago by AION

[Staples]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

What kind of music do aliens listen to?

Contemplate!

Tigran Hamasyan

Animals As Leaders - Drummer explains the music theory

My intuition says aliens would be doing some crazy Fibonacci sequence polyrhythm.

[RendHeaven]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It's more than that though.

People like really weird stuff like trashy heavy metal, awful rap, punk, dubstep, etc.

@Leo Gura Would they like this stuff if they were alone in a cave with nobody to share it with?

It's hard to tell.

A lot of modern music fanaticism has to do with branding, marketing, group-social-dynamics, loyalty to the artist that goes beyond the content of their actual work, concerts, social media, and a general mesmerization/mass hypnosis that worships "vibes" and "community" over direct experience of sound.

Lots of parallels with politics.

I also notice that people find great meaning in lyrics that resonate with their current life position. A lot of modern music emphasizes words primarily, with the beat or melody/harmony being more of an afterthought.

Being able to sing along with a song is huge for proliferation into the culture, and it's easier to capture hearts as a creator if you can match your words to their mood.

That is to say, that once again most people are not listening to music for the direct experience of sound. In this case they listen to solidify their sense of felt meaning (through interpreting the lyrics, or communing with their tribe).

I think group-think dynamics explains a great deal of bad taste. I've realized that people don't even listen to music to listen to music. They get obsessed with the auxiliary perks of music rather than the music itself.

But you're right, this is not a comprehensive picture.

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@RendHeaven But then is there such a thing as objectively bad/ugly music?

It's much easier to make a bad dish than a good one.

I leave this unanswered in my mind.

This is actually a devastatingly complex question which simultaneously cuts to the root of Consciousness as Imagination, but also demands mastery over consensus reality dynamics, and both are infinitely deep.

A few thoughts:

I believe that all sounds can be interpreted as beautiful to some potential being.

In the same way that a housefly will happily roll around in your feces no matter how repulsed you may be as a human, even the shittiest music has its respective appreciator.

So objectively "bad" or "ugly" is an uphill battle. Just the fact that bad music is allowed to exist means that it has some redeeming beauty as a figment of Consciousness. But admittedly within the arena of consensus reality, ugly things simply appear ugly, and appealing to God-Consciousness is a cop-out in a way.

The big question is: When an aesthetic displeases you as a human, is this merely your bias? Or is it actually an inferior aesthetic in the sense that it contradicts universal principles of beauty? The answer is that both can be true simultaneously.

I don't think we will ever escape our biases, but having a bias does not mean our beauty radar is totally useless.

I've been fascinated for a while by this idea of human consensus subjectivity.

Fully well knowing that beauty is:

• Absolute: everything is equally beautiful in the eyes of God
• purely relative: what one considers beautiful hinges on their individual biases

there is still a 3rd conception of beauty, a sort of half-relative half-absolute state of beauty. Some things in this realm are just so fucking beautiful that basically every human agrees that it is a work of art, despite their differences and biases. No need to invoke God-consciousness.

A really hot woman is maybe the most in-your-face example.

If she has unblemished, clear even skin, strong sexual dimorphism (relatively shorter stature, hourglass figure, higher cheekbones, larger eyes, etc) with absolute facial/body symmetry and golden ratio proportionality, positive canthal tilt, full healthy eyelashes and hair, etc... basically the entire human population will have no trouble agreeing that she is beautiful as fuck, and that is, in some sense, an instance of pseudo-objectivity, even though at best we only have a consensus subjectivity, it's as if her exact configuration hits the bullseye of our shared human preferences.

And that shared human preference is not random either, in the sense that there is deep intelligence guiding us towards holding these particular biases. In the case of a woman, these preferences are apparently proxies for health and fertility. At least that is our modern scientific justification narrative.

But it's still not truly objective or universal or even truthful since a fly on the wall wouldn't have the capacity to tell a hot woman apart from an ugly one. It's as if that distinction is unrendered in the eyes of another species. But at the same time it's unsettling to just announce that beauty is a total free-for-all. Everyone is equally beautiful! This is clearly not the case lol. To anyone that wants to contest this, go have sex with an obese saggy crusty grandma and report back to us.

I mean, this is the whole premise of plastic surgery and makeup. All these alterations and enhancements, when done right, converge towards a certain abstract ideal. It's not an accident that all Instagram models end up looking the same and suffer from wild success.

Yes, I am aware that many people overdo their cosmetic enhancements, and it gets ugly. And the oversaturation of a particular look can make it tiring. And standards change across time. And sacrificing everything for beauty is ugly in its own way.

But it's worth contemplating why nobody has plastic surgery to make their face intentionally crooked.

In all areas of life, there seems to be a similar tug-of-war between the objective and the subjective. So to the point - what is good music?

In university, I read "The Sense of Music" by Victor Zuckerkandl. I remember that he defined musical melody by saying something to the effect of:

"a cat walking across a keyboard cannot be considered music"

This was essentially his starting axiom for music, in the same way that Euclid opens the Elements by defining the geometric point and line (which are necessary for him to begin constructing geometric shapes).

I think most of us can intuitively agree to the cat anxiom. You can directly test this if you wish to be rigorous. Grab your animal of choice, and unleash it on your piano. The result is an incoherent mess of tones which does not please the human senses whatsoever.

Yeah, this axiom is fallible. It's drenched in human bias from the get-go. But we can overlook this for now.

From there, Zuckerkandl does a fantastic job at outlining the commonly-sought "design principles" behind what most humans consider "music."

When you or I think of "music," we imagine a sort of phonology and syntax, much of it unconscious, but this can be spelled out to satisfaction.

As much as I want to say that musical taste is relative, and that the pleasantness of sounds is also relative, we must admit that within the consensus reality of human life, all humans have a shared bias in the way we perceive tones and music.

I have a buddy who is much younger than me, he's still in high school but he likes to make indie games as a hobby. He got the bright idea to make his own OST, and it was a total mess. The lack of structure, the aimless "harmony" /lack thereof, it often felt like gibberish or noise. Not to throw him under the bus, but here's a sample of his tunes:

Contrast that with my other indie dev buddy. This guy clearly has a deep intuitive respect for musical phonology/syntax.

This is the difference between a total novice with 0 guidance winging it, VS a talented intermediate.

But it's still so tricky because the structural ideal towards which "good music" is converging is itself an amorphous, flexible thing.

And following the textbook rigidly leads to uninspired music as well. This is the trap of most mainstream songs.

They're not bad for failing to form coherent musical sentences; they're bad for spamming the same predictable unimaginative sentence-structures.

Tricky tricky.

And then there is the state of consciousness of the listener to consider.

Often I prefer more contemplative music.

But when I want to feel a certain frivolous way, I am happy to headbang to some playboi carti remixes:

This could easily be interpreted as "untasteful noise" to someone who isn't willing to explore a frivolous headspace.

tl;dr: there are intelligent distinctions to be made between "good" vs "bad" music. Despite the relativity of taste, it is demonstrably the case within the human sensemaking paradigm that not all songs are equally beautiful. That said, there are too many factors to consider, it's a herculean task to parse each factor in any definitive way.

Edited 14 hours ago by RendHeaven
Typo lmao

[Schizophonia]

@RendHeaven Is there a lot of plastic surgery in Japan? Like in Korea.

[RendHeaven]

27 minutes ago, Schizophonia said:

Is there a lot of plastic surgery in Japan?

The celebrities/pr0nstars/hostess/bargirls in major cities are all plastic-engineered to look like flawless anime characters. It's super hot and annoying.

However it hasn't overtaken the culture completely. Most normal girls are normal. Unlike S.Korea, where the average girl is getting plastic surgery from her parents as a graduation reward.

Example above is a S.Korean girl