Music

Pattern Recognition

It is a matter of life and death to most animals that they can focus on important things and ignore unessential ones. Some of this might be instinctive and some learned by experience but at its root it is all about recognising and responding appropriately to certain patterns, maybe weather conditions or vegetation that indicate a good source of food, or shapes or sounds that might indicate danger from a predator.


Human brains in particular seem to have a highly developed and flexible pattern recognition capability. This aspect of our intelligence has allowed us to adapt to many different climates and conditions, make the best use of available shelter and resources, and to build language and culture to communicate to each other and succeeding generations. It also allows us to appreciate and to create pattern for its own sake in the form of visual and aural Arts. The simplest form of pattern is just repetition. If we see something familiar, then it triggers memories and related thoughts, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. The repetition needn't be exact, but "similar" enough to trigger that familiarity.

Translating this into musical terms, if we hear a similar sound or group of sounds twice, then it clicks with our brains and we recognise this as a Pattern. The pattern is often fairly simple, consisting of a single note or a few notes in sequence. If the sequence of notes is too long, we will struggle to remember them. Conversely if we hear a short sequence of notes repeated many times then this becomes too boring (part of the background which we tend to ignore) and we only notice when there is a change to the sequence. You might have a picture hanging on your wall, but it is so familiar that you don't really notice it any more (until someone removes it). In the same way, we can block out repetitive noise (road traffic or next door's lawn mower) but immediately notice if it suddenly stops.

Some music is designed to be in the background, unobtrusively creating "atmosphere" or ambience in a restaurant, shop, lift or other public place. Such music should be ideally of a common volume, timbre and consistency, in other words "bland"! (It can be annoying if such music is too loud or otherwise obtrusive when you are trying to think or hold a conversation.) Other music is designed to grab your attention, by being loud or otherwise having an immediately distinctive pattern. These two types of music are often played together so that a memorable melody is distinctive and stands out from a simple accompaniment of chords and repeating percussion. Melody and accompaniment is like foreground and background in a visual scene.

In many ways writing music is trying to find a good balance between repetition (pattern) and novelty (not conforming to a pattern). If there is too much pattern then it becomes the norm, our brains then "tune it out" and it becomes part of the background while we turn our attention onto other things. If the music changes and something new arises, it will grab our attention again. But too much novelty is hard to relate to. Music which is ever changing without an immediately recognisable pattern can seem like just random "white noise" and again we "tune it out" as being uninteresting and relegate it to the background. Some composers have experimented with ways of generating musical patterns which might be mathematically perfect, but if our ears don't notice these patterns the music becomes an academic exercise and fails to move the listeners.

Musical patterns give rise to figures, phrases, themes, melodies, forms and styles and help musicians to provide both recognition and variety in music and optimise the listener's experience by providing works that seems consistent and balanced yet with interesting features to make the experience enjoyable. Sometimes people listen with concentration to music and become involved with it, but at other times the music is playing in the background (see Film Music) or accompanying another activity. Nevertheless the unconscious experience can have an affect on us, largely due to Pattern Recognition.