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ScotterC 2 hours ago

Right on. In my experience across different art fields, I’d say the only generalizable facet of ‘good’ art/music/etc is the “it sits just outside of what we expect”.

These days I liken it more to the idea of ‘surprise’ in information entropy which denotes an informative signal then to revealing any sort of objective truth.

klik99 an hour ago | parent [-]

You might like the book Emotion and Meaning in Music - it starts from some outdated psychological ideas (that emotions are only intensity and that we assign positive/negative valence post-hoc) but ties that to early information theory and makes a really compelling theory of music that's all about the interplay between expectation and surprise, across both the physical harmonic ratio stuff this paper talks about and the cultural associations too.