An early cybernetic device interacted with musicians as part of a live ensemble. The machine detected novelty in the sounds it was hearing and would grow "bored" if the musicians' improvisations did not keep up. People who played with it interesting experiences. (I can dig up a reference to this if anyone's interested..)

A quick search yields this: http://www.girlwonder.com/2010/09/a-network-of-constant-inte...

  "Gordon Pask developed musical cybernetic systems that count as early
   cyborg hybrids. His 1953 Musicolour machine accompanied musical
   performers. As the performer or group played, Musicolour responded with
   lights and movement to the music would change, creating a sort of
   hypnotic effect for those who played with it. But if the performer
   became too repetitive and did not engage the machine enough, Musicolour
   would grow bored and stop responding—the first cybernetic art system to
   do so. [4] Pask also noted that while people trained the machine, it
   trained them back, creating a feedback loop in which performers felt
   like the machine was an extension of their minds and bodies.[5]"

[4] Gordon Pask, “A Comment, a Case History and a Plan,” in Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas, ed. Jasia Reichardt (Greenwich, Conn.,: New York Graphic Society, 1971), 77.

[5] Ibid., 85.

For those who asked, yes it was Pask. Cheers biot. I first heard about it in the book "The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future" by Andrew Pickering, which contains other eye-opening gems.

Interested, please post.

Has anyone played with http://brainpaint.com/ ? Generates fractals from brainwaves for "therapy".

absolutely curious- ive thought about trying to build some kind of models that help create interesting "melodies" by jumbling things around for maximum novelty. maybe someone knows of some experiements like that too?

Please do, would love to find out more on this.

Totally interested!

Good article and actually having audio to illustrate the things the author talks about is helpful. For people interested in diving into this concept more deeply, there's a whole theoretical/analytical approach around musical expectation that was developed back in the 90s by Eugene Narmour: The Implication-Realization model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implication-Realization). Interestingly enough, it looks like the predictive power of the model holds up pretty well when tested in the real world: http://www.erin.utoronto.ca/~w3psygs/SchellenbergCognition.p...

I've been out of the music theory game for a while, so I don't know if anyone's doing much with the I-R model anymore, but it's a fascinating approach to music analysis.

Although the 'Nokia Ringtone' was attributed correctly to Tarrega in a footnote, its title was never mentioned. The piece is called 'Gran Vals'.

Just listened to it on youtube - this upsets the expectations by having a ringtone in the middle of some otherwise lovely music!

The piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQzUx3QW2Y

Too right, too right.

Dammit! Turn your phone off during the perf- oh, that's right.

One of my favorite jazz pieces is Happy Madness off a Jobim compilation album. The whole piece tries to get you to hear a specific note, and then tricks you with a different one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIphJGkY3Rw

Now this is music theory! There was this heated discussion back here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472157

Well, that notation-jargon is still not real theory, and this stuff from the nautil.us link here is. This is the stuff to understand if you want to understand music.

Reminds me of the bit about Chopin leading listeners on for the satisfying note/chord in this Benjamin Zander talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passio...

Cool post! I think as technologists seeking to build tools for music creation, browsing, etc. there are some high level points to take from Professor Berger's article. As we deploy machine learning to match listeners and songs, we're often blindly satisfying expectations, when the entire essence of musical experience seems wrapped up in upsetting expectations.

This is a cool post, it's interesting how our brains react to unexpected changes in the music. It's almost as though we receive a rush of endorphins when our brains guess the upcoming melody and are proven right, which makes us slightly off put when it is different

Article crashed my Firefox on mobile, was wondering why...

Then I did a network trace on desktop and see that the header PNG image is 1 megabyte. The whole page with all those SoundCloud iframes are a whopping 9 megabytes. Ugh.