Music scientist Phillip Dorrell [0] has argued for the existence of currently hypothetical "strong music," a class of musical stimuli presumably discoverable by strong AI.<p>The idea makes sense if you accept the concept of "intelligence explosion." Any property, in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. So through a really powerful search and optimization process that can more efficiently explore remote, undiscovered regions of music-space, we get a "music explosion."<p>What these songs would sound like is the real mystery. Would they sound anything like the music we're familiar with? Would they lead to musical wireheading?<p>It also seems a bad idea to measure musical goodness by, say, how many times humans will replay a certain audio file. If you use this measure, I don't think you'll end with what you want at all.<p>See also "supernormal stimuli": <a href="https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/</a><p>[0] <a href="https://whatismusic.info/" rel="nofollow">https://whatismusic.info/</a>
This is incredible! I've wanted to build something like this for a while.<p>I sing in a barbershop quartet with 4 engineers, and we are constantly trying to tweak our tunings to optimise consonance of the chords we're singing. It can lead to interesting occurrences where you have to tune 2 consecutive notes differently
despite the fact they are <i>on paper</i> the same note.
This is interesting but I wish it included some information about the definition of "dissonance" being used. Of course xenharmonic stuff sometimes sounds out of tune just because it's unfamiliar, but also there's a temptation to go too far the other direction and assume that something must be exploring profound new harmonic space just because it sounds bad.