what it is they have against
repetition
Would you come to HN every day if the linked articles never changed?
I'm quite enamoured with Schmidthuber's theory of creativity [1, 2] Schmidhuber develops a theory of artificial curiosity and creativity for an autonomous agent. The agent is equipped with an adaptive predictor trying to predict future events from the history of previous events and actions. A reward-maximising, reinforcement learning, adaptive controller is steering the controller and gets curiosity reward for executing action sequences that improve the predictor. (I term this "Pattern Recognition as Pleasure".) This discourages the agent from executing actions leading to boring outcomes that are either predictable or totally unpredictable. Instead the controller is motivated to learn actions that help the predictor to learn new, previously unknown regularities in its environment, thus improving its model of the world, which in turn can greatly help to solve externally given tasks. Schmidhuber claims that his corresponding formal theory of creativity explains essential aspects of art, science, music, and humor.
If we were to take Schmidhuber's approach seriously, then that that which we enjoy as great art (as creative) would be that which is on the edge of the observer's ability to compress/understand. Note that this is highly observer dependent! What I have been comprehending for a long time and dismiss as boring, might be extremly interesting for somebody else, and vice versa.
In my own life this was born out: I used to enjoy pop-music so much and didn't worry about repetition -- in fact I didn't notice it. I loved pop-music so much that I learned how to make it. This lead to my disenchantment with pop-music: when I was finally able to produce decent pop-music (I was able to compress it into a few rules), I lost interest, and sought novelty elsewhere.
never heard of trance
[1] J. Schmidhuber, Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html
[2] J. Schmidhuber, Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity & Creativity. https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674
[3] https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Music_and_Trance.html...
Further, have these critics never heard of trance (as in the state of consciousness, not the music genre)? Or of altered states of consciousness brought on by drugs, (repetitive) music, and other means, to which the repetition in music can be so sympathetic? There is also the simple visceral response that people have to music -- a response that defies analysis, is not intellectual.
Many people clearly enjoy being in the space that relatively simple, repetitive music brings them to, and I'm still puzzled why that's seen as being so wrong.