Re: MUSIC and MIND ... Fwd: quick question -- AGI-16 snacks and reception sponsorship?

good try , but misses any biology, it is a shape in sound space , that needs to be coherent under cerain inherent constraints. the line theory and the haromic theory , relate to colors in paintings, it is in my words a representation of a MOBJECT . my mental objects. , they have context shape projections and time. more later

On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 10:02 AM, Ben Goertzel < > wrote:
Hah ... no, I haven't taken any drugs since April in Las Vegas ;) ...
This variety of music theory looks interesting ("Westergaardian"), but I haven't studied it deeply yet
https://mathemusicality.wordpress.com/category/westergaardian-theory/
Indeed a jingle has a great amount of emergent pattern involved -- both between its various sub-patterns, and between its sub-patterns and other patterns in the assumed musical history and context of the listener ...
Joscha and I look forward to seeing you Thursday, and yes, we will bring a few Al researcher friends along.
-- Ben

On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 6:26 PM, jeffrey E. jeevacation@gmail.com wrote: > you must be on drugs. .. . that being said , interesting views. but > again, lets start at what makes a tune or melody. it is a difficult > question. and my music friends say a jingle is one of the most > sohisticated of sounds. . immediatley pleasurable. bring up to 8 > others on thurs, i will have a blckboard. > > On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 4:35 PM, Ben Goertzel < wrote:

Looking forward to discussing AGI with you and a few others on the 21st ;-)
In the meantime, semi-relevantly, I thought some more about surprisingness, pattern, music, etc....
Musing about how musical psychology relates to the psychology of other human activities, I started musing about the role of unpredictable timing in sexual arousal ...
In the pre-orgasm phase, extremely regular and predictable movements are great, as long as they're the right movements
But in the earlier phase, where arousal is still being built up, random variations in timing are desirable. That is, a specific pleasurable motion every 5 seconds is worse than the same pleasurable motion delivered with a MEAN interval of 5 seconds but random variation of, say, 2 seconds variance on either side. My suspicion is that this is true if the movements are delivered by a purely automated tool, but even more true if the movements are delivered by an agent that has emotions or is perceived to have emotions.
What is this all about?
To understand this we have to understand that human pleasure has at least three aspects:

1. Raw underlying pleasure
2. Comparison of pleasure to immediately-past pleasure
3. Comparison of pleasure to (e.g. cognitively) expected pleasure
   So, considering the scenario above (building arousal via the tension induced from random timing variations in pleasure), when the pleasure comes a few seconds early, then one is getting MORE THAN EXPECTED, right? That's pretty exciting! One expected to get goodies after 5 seconds, but instead one got them after 3 - woo hoo! As our excitement is often proportional to the difference between what's expected and what's obtained, getting goodies at 3 seconds when one only expected them at 5 seconds is GOOD - assuming that one is time-discounting reward, so that rewards occurring sooner are, by some factor, better.
   But what about when the pleasure comes a few seconds later? Well, by the time 7 seconds have rolled around, one is feeling pretty eager and disappointed and frustrated. After all, the pleasure was supposed to come at 5 seconds, right?! But wait a moment - that makes it all the more pleasurable when it comes along after 7 seconds! The pleasure is not just delivering pleasure, it's delivering relief from frustration. Because we derive excitement from the contrast of what we get with what we HAVE, as well as from the contrast of what we get with what we expected. And because the disappearance of pain (or even the shift between different kinds of pain) can bring its own kind of pleasure.
   But if the goodies predictably came after 3 seconds, or after 7 seconds, then expectations would just get recalibrated — and the new "on time" would be 3 or 7 seconds instead of 5. If 3 seconds is what's expected, then 3 seconds isn't excitingly soon anymore — 1 second is excitingly soon ... and 7 seconds isn't a tantalizing delay anymore... it's a highly frustrating delay that starts making one bored or angry or confused....
   The delay from 5 to 7 seconds may be just enough to create a little frustration, which is rapidly vanquished in a poof of release when the pleasure finally comes. But a delay from 3 to 7 seconds might be so long that frustration builds up to the point where the pleasure doesn't release it when it finally comes — perhaps the delay is long enough to trigger some cognitive process thinking "WTF is going on, is the pleasure ever gonna come again?"
   3 seconds or 5 seconds may be long enough for some anticipation to build and then get fulfilled. If the pleasure came after half a second the experience would basically be one of pleasure never stopping — which in a way would be more pleasurable, but in a way would be less pleasurable, because the process of building an expectation and then getting it fulfilled would not be there... and at the cognitive rather than purely physiological level, pleasure is largely about expectations and their fulfillment and disappointment...
   Now, human sexual arousal is not one-dimensional, there's not just one "pleasure button" being pushed at various intervals. Rather, there are various different tissues which are stimulated by different things, and which get pleased, roused to anticipation, and become frustrated upon neglect — with different time-scales. So what one has in a real situation of human sexual arousal is the above story, but on a variety of different tissues, each with their own characteristic time-scales. There is a sort of symphony of anticipation, fulfillment and frustration, as at any given time some tissues may be satisfied, some may be anticipating, and some may be frustrated....
   And then of course, in human sexual arousal, there is also an overlay of more complex emotions besides pleasure and its expectation and frustration. When the other party seems eager and keeps getting ahead of what seems to be the natural rhythm, that may make one feel loved or at least desired; a lackluster or overly robotic rhythm may make one feel that the other party isn't really into it; etc. The arousal of these emotions is more variable among different people, whereas the basic logic of arousal via expectation and frustration is more generic. A person's specific physiological and emotional makeup, layered on top of the basic biology of human physical pleasure and the math of expectation fulfillment and frustration, add up to form that person's personal sexual pleasure calculus...
   The next ingredient to introduce into the story is PATTERNS. In a sexual context, stimulation is not just a matter of delivering pleasure to one or another tissue; pleasure may be delivered in specific patterns of touch geometry and intensity, and the body comes to expect these patterns. A "French corkscrew twist" movement of one sex organ within or around the other; or a stroke of the hand repeatedly up and down the lover's hip; etc. etc. Such a movement pattern will typically have a certain timing, and can be accelerated or delayed, inducing dynamics of expectation, fulfillment, frustration, tension, etc. Furthermore, movement patterns impact each other, as they may involve adjacent, overlapping or more subtly cross-connected parts of the body ... so that fulfillment of one may cause deferral of another, etc. Kissing on the neck faster and faster may cause what's happening with the genitals to temporarily get slower and softer, etc. — pleasure via acceleration in one place correlated with pleasure via temporary frustration and then fulfillment in another place.
   And this complexity brings us finally back to music. In music we have many complex patterns unfolding through time, each eliciting expectations regarding what will come next. The symmetries of musical scales and chords are instrumental in forming these expectations. When a chord pattern has been repeating, one expects it will continue. When a melodic line has been going up a certain scale, one expects it will continue. When a melodic line has been going up and down within a certain scale, one thinks it will stay within that scale. When two melodic patterns have occurred, each immediately followed by their inversions ... and then a third one occurs, one expects it will be immediately followed by its inversion. And so forth.
   So what we have in music is a collection of interlocking patterns, each giving rise to expectations. Each of these expectations may happen a little sooner or a little later than expected, thus causing extra bursts of pleasure in accordance with the basic logic of anticipation, frustration and pleasure. Making one pattern continue sooner or more intensely, will generally cause some other pattern to continue later or less intensely — thus weaving a complex web of fulfillments and frustrations, which reminds us of the complex webs of fulfillment and expectation in our inner and outer lives.
   A series of notes in time displaying an increasing amount of pattern, will often have the property of fulfilling an increasing number of the expectations elicited based on the previously occurring patterns. So on the whole it will give the feeling of increasing pleasure — increasing fulfillment of expectation. But of course it's hard for this to go on too long, because creating an increasing amount of pattern is difficult, assuming these patterns must have some emotionally evocative content in themselves, and that all the patterns are created via arranging the basic notes, chords and scales in the vocabulary of modern music. So typically in a substantial piece of music, after a build-up in which the time-series of musical events generates a greater and greater density of patterns, things relax. Here the intellect is being less stimulated, but if the relaxation comes with continuation of a pattern that is emotionally resonant, then the experience is still satisfying. We see in this case the combination of the primal/visceral and the mathematical in music. The mathematics of pattern emergence and tension buildup are critical, but there is also a simple matter of resonance with the rhythm of human bodily life — there is something innately satisfying, to anyone with a human body, about quieting down and proceeding at a slow regular rhythm after a huge burst of increasingly complexly patterned activity.
   On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Ben Goertzel < > wrote: > Formulating the norm is exactly what music theory is about, right? > But the tricky thing is knowing which deviations from the norm are > going to sound awesome and which are going to sound like screw-ups....
   You know Schmidhuber's theory of beauty as increase in compressibility?
   http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
   http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/sice2009.pdf
   It's not quite right but it's insightful ... a deviation from the norm that sounds awesome usually is one that causes some meaningful but not-wholly-expected pattern to come about... i.e. an increase in compressibility...
   Actually I think an increase in the number of compressing patterns is perhaps more important than an increase in compressibility.
   "Surprising fulfillment of expectations" means:
   -- the previous expectation is fulfilled, i.e the previous compressing pattern continues
   -- a new, surprising factor is found... but probably one that also leads to a new pattern in the overall perceived music, hence a new/different compressing pattern
   So surprising fulfillment of expectations is one route to get to "increase in the number of compressing patterns" ...
   But music theory constrains the set of ways that one can get increase in the number of compressing patterns, without getting too complex (within the context of the 12-note scale... but if one used other scales one would find similar mathematical structures) ...
   ...
   About your other question: So far the recurrent neural nets, convolutional neural nets etc. that have been used for language generation based on corpus-based-training, tend to generate gibberish that looks OK in the short run but nonsensical in the medium run. I.e. plausible looking phrases but meaningless/fucked-up long sentences or paragraphs...
   A game like Go or Atari games is quite different from natural language because it's a closed system, so the scope of patterns that can occur is much more limited than in the case of anything involved with real human life... In the case of stuff that's real-human-life-related, it's hard to hide from the need to understand particulars in a general context... but in a game the context is always the game, which simplifies things a lot (unless the game were as complicated as the real world, but that's never the case in 2016...)...
   I can explain to you my specific plan for solving the "sensible, context-appropriate language generation" problem in an OpenCog context sometime if you're curious...
   part 1 is here
   https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.3372
   and part 2 is here
   http://wiki.opencog.org/wikihome/index.php/Lojbanic_Relex2Logic
   ... but those documents are kind of insular, they're hard to understand without a rich knowledge of how OpenCog NLP system currently works... we can discuss F2F or on Skype sometime perhaps...
   -- Ben
   On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 9:37 PM, jeffrey E. jeevacation@gmail.com wrote:

suprise is the the breaking of the expectation. . first we have to formularize the norm. why can a an adult immediatley here an obvious" wrong note" in a mozart piece of thousands of notes. ? it is a spike on the sphere.?. why are certain harmonics pleasing. i think it might take a lower energy to deconstruct into their fundamentals? dissocnace takes so much energy like a key on glass scratch that it elicits physical signs of pain. noam thinks that the ability to recoginze might be an integral part of development, ie not merely learned. .
can either deep mind, alpha go or any system like the ones set to play video games on their own, be fed english language speakers and then be able to construct simple sentences.? a deliverable that i have been asking you guys for, for years now. is learning the video game different? thanks
On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 9:30 AM, Ben Goertzel wrote:

Sure... Meyer's "surprising fulfillment of expectations" is all about time, right? But among the several questions is raises are
-- what kinds of expectations are elicited?
-- what constitutes surprise and why?
The music theory elaborated in those papers explains what kinds of expectations tend to be elicited in music ... which then conditions what will be perceived as surprising and what will not...
E.g. if a melodic line is operating with a certain scale for a while, there will be an expectation that the next note is within that same scale.... If the next note is not within that scale, but rather what happens is a chord that gives rise to a note in the original scale as a higher harmonic, then one may have a surprising fulfillment of expectations of a mathematically explicable sort. But it may be that playing this latter chord a little bit LATER than the beat that would be expected via assumption of periodicity, gives the whole thing a bit more oomph -- in this case one is fulfilling the expectation in a temporally slightly surprising way... but there's also the "joke" of leaving the listener waiting a bit to see if the scale will be continued or not, and then after the wait fulfilling it in a way that is both more (more notes) and less (the expected scale is only there in a higher harmonic) than expected.... There is a physiological metaphor to how the "heart misses a beat" sometime... and an emotional resonance with the feeling of waiting with bated breath to see what will happen, and then finally something happens and it's richer than expected so a bit overwhelming...
That's a trivial example but it illustrates how the timing and the static-music-theory and the emotion and body-references all play together in the context of surprising fulfillment of expectations...
On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 8:41 PM, jeffrey E. jeevacation@gmail.com wrote:

i think of it like points in space. the rythms are the disttance between the points. and the melody is the projection on a plane.. music needs recapitualtion . unless indian, your papers are more like work on soap bubbles. shapes, but little timing.
On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:56 PM, Ben Goertzel < wrote:

I agree that rhythm is important but the actual sequence (and concurrent arrangement) of notes is important too... those papers certainly don't tell the whole story but I think they tell part of the story...
I experimented a lot in the 90s with: taking series of notes evolved by a GA (well the GA evolved the coefficients of a fractal-generating iterated function system), and then playing the same evolved note-series with different timings. I.e., I made up various timing rules, and I also played the notes with timings that I made up myself. Definitely it's true that the timing is critical, and the same series of notes with different timing will sound totally different and have a different feeling...
However, nevertheless, the mathematical structures noted in those papers are important...
How timing interacts with these mathematical structures is one of many open questions, right?
Put crudely, I think the algebra (as hinted in those papers) of a series of notes identifies what patterns are there to be easily recognized in the series of notes. But there are always gonna be too many patterns there. The timing puts boundaries around some patterns and not others, thus narrowing down the scope of possible patterns in the note-series, and identifying some rather than others.... And the timing also is what resonates with the dynamics of human emotions and human body-rhythms...
so the subtlety of timing in music is partly that it has to serve multiple functions
-- emphasizing certain ones, among the many patterns implicit mathematically in a series of notes
-- resonating with human emotion and body rhythms
...
ben
On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 10:40 AM, jeffrey E. jeevacation@gmail.com wrote:

third paper same problem, bach was to have said playing piano is easy just push the right note at the right TIME. one without the other, is meaningless. imagine a minute wait between any of the group theory relevant notes. it woudl not be music

[...truncated for brevity, but the full thread continues with detailed discussion of music theory, AGI, and sponsorship for the AGI-16 conference, including quoted emails from Ben Goertzel and jeffrey E.]