PLAY IT AGAIN

Aesthetics are intriguing. Beauty may be in the eye and ear of the beholder, but it must have a basis, perhaps even a function, deep in the neurons of our central nervous system. Recently I ran across an interesting assertion: According to one source, “The optimal percentage of redundancy for the perception of beauty by the human brain is 20%”. Twenty percent. A sort of “Golden Mean” of aesthetical repetition. This implies that people are attracted to something that repeats itself frequently, but not to excess. Perhaps when my children imply that my conversations repeat themselves, maybe what they really mean is that my verbal redundancy has reached an unaesthetic 40% level.
The beauty of moderate redundancy actually makes a lot of sense. People tend to say “I know what I like”, but they really mean “I like what I know”. Our brains seem to feel happiest when novel stimuli are balanced with the familiar. In the visual arts, repetition is a frequent theme: a row of white aspen trunks, a trio of babies in flower pots, or multiple spots of scarlet in a painted abstract resonate with our visual cortex. The Redundancy Rule gives us a mathematical means to evaluate art; on the next visit to the Seattle Art Museum, you can nod knowingly to an art patron nearby and note “I like it, but with 10% more redundancy I think it could be a masterpiece”.
Repetition is a vital part of music. A small group of notes played in sequence becomes a motif, and this motif can be varied and repeated to build a beautiful composition. The trick is to find just the right amount of repetition. When I listen to jazz musicians of varying levels of expertise, it is evident that novice players often “wander around”, playing lots of different notes that are technically correct (according to the chords and scales of the tune), but not very appealing. A great player can say more by repeating and inverting a phrase of just a few notes than the inexperienced player expresses with a constant stream of unrelated musical phrases. More redundancy may be the difference between the beautiful and the banal.
The general concept of incorporating just the right amount of musical redundancy sounds like a good recipe for beautiful composition or great improvisation, but it raises a number of questions.
At what level(s) does this redundancy take place? By my calculation, a tune in AABA format (typical of many standards, which consist of an 8-bar melody, a repeat of that melody, a different 8 bar tune, and then a repeat of the original 8 bars) would contain an overall redundancy of 50%, since half of the song consists of melody that has already been played. Too much? On a much finer level, individual notes might be repeated without being recognized as redundant. (An old bandstand joke: A listener asks “Do you know how to play Stardust”, to which the bandleader replies “No, but we can play Bye Bye Blackbird, and it has a lot of the same notes in it”).
If we were to strive for that ideal 20% redundancy, which musical elements are eligible for repetition? Rhythm is just as important as pitch, after all. If we use entirely different pitches, but play them in the exact same rhythm as the previous musical phrase, is that 50% redundancy? Tone and timbre are also essential parts of music; if the trombone comes in and plays the exact same phrase as the guitarist just played, is that 100% redundant, or just (some might say) 100% unnecessary?
And where does that leave us with Free Jazz? There is no reason why totally free improvisation can’t utilize the perfect proportions of repetition and variety, but many jazz experimenters seem to avoid repeating themselves. Perhaps that is why even the free jazz players are heard to remark that the music is more fun to play than to listen to.

I thought of closing this blog by simply repeating the first paragraph of this essay for an aesthetically redundant effect, but that might make the whole subject (some might say) 100% unnecessary.