But We Like Repetition!
Repetition is a powerful and often underacknowledged aesthetic operative.
Quoted in The Mental Life of Modernism. Consider this a companion to this post.
Elizabeth Margulis reports on an experiment that demonstrates the importance of repetition and music:
"In a 2012 study, I asked participants without special musical training—everyday music listeners—to listen to excerpts from challenging contemporary art music (atonal pieces by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter) and rate on a 7-point scale how much they'd enjoyed each excerpt, how interesting they'd found it, and how likely they thought the excerpt was to have been composed by a human artist rather than randomly generated by a computer. . . ."
"Unbeknownst to the participants, mixed in with the original excerpts were adaptations of them. In these adaptations, segments of music had been extracted and reinserted to add repetitions of some material; repetitions that could occur immediately or after some other music had intervened. . . ."
"Listeners rated the immediate and delayed repetition versions as reliably more enjoyable, more interesting, and more likely to have been composed by a human artist rather than generated randomly by a computer. Even roomfuls of PhD-holding music theorists, when presented these examples at a meeting of the Society for Music Theory (Minneapolis, 2011)—an audience sympathetic to Berio and Carter if ever there were one—confessed to finding the versions more likable on first pass. This is a stunning finding, particularly as the original versions were crafted by internationally renowned composers and the (preferred) repeated versions were created by brute stimulus manipulation without regard to artistic quality. The simple introduction of repetition, independent of musical aims or principles, elevated people's enjoyment, interest, and judgments of artistry. This suggests that repetition is a powerful and often underacknowledged aesthetic operative."
