Music, Mind, and Meaning

This is a revised version of AI Memo No. 616, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. An earlier published version appeared in Music, Mind, and Brain: The Neuropsychology of Music (Manfred Clynes, ed.) Plenum, New York, 1981 Why Do We Like Music? Why do we like music? Our culture immerses us in it for hours each day, and everyone knows how it touches our emotions, but few think of how music touches other kinds of thought. Have we the tools for such work? Certainly we know a bit about the obvious processes of reason–the ways we organize and represent ideas we get. The old distinctions among emotion, reason, and aesthetics are like the earth, air, and fire of an ancient alchemy. Much of what we now know of the mind emerged in this century from other subjects once considered just as personal and inaccessible but which were explored, for example, by Freud in his work on adults' dreams and jokes, and by Piaget in his work on children's thought and play. Why do we like music? Cadence.

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Blew my head right off...serious...just a jagged bloody neck end on my shoulders now. by wiggleworts Sep 30