by Jonah Lehrer
Kanye had his beat, this cadence coming in at the wrong time.VII But these Honolulu songs had layers of samples and sounds. “Runaway” might begin with a single piano note—the simplest of musical acts—but it dissolves into a sonic collage of dirty drum samples and a mean Pusha T. But what Kanye said about his celebrity persona also applies to his music: “My existence is selvage denim at this point, it’s a vintage Hermès bag. All the stains just make it better.”35
The last few minutes of “Runaway” capture this dissolution. After nearly six minutes of celebrating his own douchebaggery, Kanye returns to the sound of that solo piano. We’re prepared for a typical outro, which would repeat the opening melody along with a gentle fade-out, perhaps featuring that same high E-natural. Pop songs are supposed to follow this cyclic pattern.
Kanye does the opposite. He starts off with an inaudible mumble set against two cellos. Some insist Kanye’s saying, “I’mma be honest”; others hear, “No pianos.” His voice is indecipherable because it’s been highly processed in Auto-Tune, a musical device that’s traditionally been used to fix flawed vocals. (Auto-Tune can alter the pitch of a recording to ensure that a singer hits the right notes, shifting the sound to the nearest correct semitone.) Kanye, however, uses Auto-Tune to distort his voice beyond recognition, setting the pitch corrector to its most extreme setting and pairing it with a distortion filter and a fuzz box. The result is a vocal track that sounds like a wailing electric guitar. There are no lyrics, just pure cathartic emotion, channeled into a noise we’ve never before heard. “The ‘Runaway’ piece at the end, when it’s like my voice being changed into a guitar, when I did that, I was tearing up,” Kanye would later say. “Just humming the abstracted notes, I was crying just humming notes. And the notes were more expressive than the words.”
The Mystery of Goose Bumps
In the late 1950s, a musicologist named Leonard Meyer published a series of technical papers that attempted to solve the ancient mystery of music. It’s a mystery that has perplexed everyone from Aristotle to Schopenhauer: How did such an abstract art form generate such intense emotions?
To make sense of this mystery, Meyer analyzed a wide variety of songs and symphonies, from Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131, to the Delta blues. He looked at Brahms piano sonatas and the rhythms of East African folk music, Chinese lute melodies and Italian arias. According to Meyer, the differences between these musical creations concealed their shared aesthetic strategy. While the melodies might not sound alike, they all worked in the same way.
Meyer laid out his evidence most clearly in a 1959 humbly titled paper, “Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music.”36 In the paper, Meyer compared a fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach to one by Francesco Geminiani, an obscure eighteenth-century composer. As Meyer notes, both fugues are similar in their basic melodic structure: they begin on the fifth note of the scale, move to the tonic, and then jump an octave. This jump, writes Meyer, “creates a structural gap, a sense of incompleteness. We expect that the empty space thus outlined will be filled in.”
The question is how that empty space is filled in. As Meyer points out, Geminiani completes the melody’s structural gap in a highly predictable manner, choosing those notes (B, then E) that sound most probable to the ear. “When the theme falls to this obvious consequent with neither delay nor diversion, it seems like a blatant platitude, a musical cliché,” Meyer writes. Geminiani has created a puzzle, but its answer is rather obvious. As soon as the gap is opened, we know how it will be closed. The pattern remains predictable.
Bach, in contrast, comes up with a far more difficult melody. While Geminiani moves swiftly to close the gap, Bach moves slowly, digressing into related harmonic areas. He flirts with possible resolutions but then backs away; the music hints at tonics it refuses to deliver; even the rhythms are varied, as Bach introduces new tempos before finally giving us the closure we want. Although Bach’s music is much more complicated, it’s also much more emotional: the beauty of the work is rooted in the way it provides “temporary resistance” to the questions it provokes. “The greater the buildup of suspense, of tension, the greater the emotional release upon resolution,” Meyer writes.37 While the release generates the aesthetic pleasure, there can be no release without the uncertainty that came before. The meaning of music depends on the way it violates its own form.
To prove his point, Meyer delves into the realm of information theory. “Musical events take place in a world of stylistic probability,” he writes. If a single note is played, it can be followed by many different notes; the world of pitches is wide-open. However, as more notes are added, and as the piece develops its keys and themes, the possibilities begin to shrink. We can increasingly predict what sound is coming next, as we use the patterns of the past to forecast the future. According to information theory, such highly predictable systems—say, a Geminiani fugue, or a pop song by the Eagles—communicate a minimal amount of information. Because we already know what’s going to happen, the message is mostly irrelevant. As the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener put it, “The more probable the message, the less its information. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.”38
The musical mystery—what we don’t know—is the primary source of information in the art. By undermining our ability to predict the resolution, by not closing the gap in the expected way, the unpredictable notes force us to notice all the subtleties in the message. All that extra information makes the work harder to solve; the art exceeds our ability to perceive it.VIII When listening to Bach, we understand less about the music, at least compared to Geminiani’s. Kanye makes hip-hop that’s impossible to decipher. But such mystery also makes the work worthy of attention.
In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, a team of researchers at McGill University looked at individuals who reliably experienced chills, or frisson, in response to music.39 The scientists asked these subjects to bring in their playlists of favorite songs—virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango—and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored with fMRI and PET scanners.
Not surprisingly, the experience of music lit up the cortex, with a large spike in activity in dopamine-rich areas. The more interesting finding emerged from a close study of the timing of this response, as the scientists looked to see what was happening in the seconds before the subjects got chills. In essence, the scientists found that our favorite moments in the music were preceded by a prolonged increase of activity in the caudate, a brain area associated with breaches of expectation. (The caudate, remember, is also turned on during magic tricks that break the rules of reality.)
What kind of musical passages excite the caudate? According to the scientists, the brain area is sensitive to those sections of music in which composers violate “expectations in certain ways or by delaying the predicted outcome (for example, by inserted unexpected notes or slowing tempo).”40 What’s interesting is that it’s not the consonant chorus or rousing climax that triggers those chills. It’s the difficulty that comes before.IX
This is the paradox of beautiful art: it is often hard to understand, or at least a little disfluent. It’s not the easy content that touches us deep—it’s the difficult stuff, those poems without punctuation and pop songs without precursors. We pay attention to bedtime books that break the rules and horror movies that reject the tropes and tricks of every previous horror movie.X
The feeling of beauty is inherently subjective. The dissonance of Kanye might make Kanye cry, but it might sound like noise to you; Bach is sublime, unless he’s boring; each of us is moved by specific forms of disfluency and dissonance. Yet, despite these endless variations in taste, a clear theme emerges: beauty requires work. It demands a high quality of attention, the willingness to wrestle with material that resists our understanding. Keats may have been wrong: beauty is not truth. Rather, it is the consolation that comes from engaging with material that obscures its truth, leaving u
s with memorable questions instead.
It’s easy to settle for complacency. The brain is lazy by design; the path of least resistance is to seek out material that we already know how to perceive. But the best art compels us to choose the more mysterious path, delivering sensations that are strange and unsettling. Such art is a struggle. It’s a struggle to enjoy and a struggle to explain. The struggle is why it lasts.
I. Shklovsky used the Russian word ostranenie, which has also been translated as “estrangement” or “making strange.”
II. Compare a typical Dickinson poem to the opening stanza of “The Day Is Done” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most celebrated American poet of the nineteenth century:
The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
Longfellow is leaning heavily on the most familiar poetic structures. He uses a simple iambic cadence and the rhyming scheme of a nursery rhyme (ABCB). As a result, the poem is easy to understand on first reading.
III. As Stein put it, “If a reader doesn’t know that a question is a question when he reads it, then a question mark can’t tell him.”
IV. But these violations should never be haphazard or reckless; Goodnight Moon is filled with thoughtful details invented by Brown and her brilliant illustrator, Clement Hurd. When the book begins, the little bunny is already in bed; sleep seems imminent; the hour hand of the clock is at 7:00. But as every parent knows, bedtime can take a while. By the time the little bunny says goodnight to the noises everywhere—and then presumably passes out—the clock is at 8:10, and the moon has risen into the window frame. Such precision is emblematic of Brown’s approach. Even her simplest books are exquisitely layered.
V. The seamless interplay of visual and text was only possible because Bernbach insisted that the writer and art director work together on the concept. In every other agency, the headline and copy would typically be written first and only then sent to the art director for layout.
VI. There is no such thing as a Kanye sound. While every Drake album sounds like a Drake album, Kanye reinvents himself with each new release. The chipmunk soul of Late Registration gave way to the bleak electronic minimalism of 808s & Heartbreak, which, in turn, the lush maximalist sounds of “Runaway” and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy surpassed. If there is a recurring theme to these pop masterpieces, it’s a skepticism of musical convention. Kanye’s only consistency is his refusal to conform.
VII. The human mind is most intrigued by slight rhythmic imperfections. According to a recent study by scientists at Harvard and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, human drummers tend to systematically deviate from the robotic pulse of a metronome or a drum machine, falling ahead or behind of the rhythm by ten to twenty milliseconds per beat. (That’s less time than it takes to blink.) However, these human deviations aren’t entirely random. Rather, the best drummers tend to deviate from a “perfect” beat by obeying sweeping and subtle patterns. “You can have these trends [with human drummers],” Holger Hennig, a physicist at Harvard, told the Harvard Gazette. “For example, the drummer plays ahead of the beat for thirty consecutive beats, while half a minute earlier, he tended to play slightly behind the metronome clicks. These trends are pleasant to the ear.”34 In short, we want the beat to be subversive but not inscrutable. Another little mystery layered in with all the rest.
VIII. Edmund Burke, in his treatise On the Sublime and Beautiful, argued that one of the defining features of the sublime was “obscurity,” which he defined as the absence of clarity. “A great clearness helps but little towards affecting the passions,” Burke wrote. “It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration.”
IX. In a recent paper, “Thrills, Chills, Frissons and Skin Orgasms: Towards an Integrative Model of Transcendent Psychophysiological Experiences in Music,” scientists at Wesleyan University attempted to dissect the particular forms of difficulty that are most closely associated with musical chills. One of the most effective techniques is the melodic appoggiatura, a musical flourish in which a dissonant (or nonchord note) appears before resolving into the melody, thus creating extra emphasis. It’s Adele’s fluttering voice during the chorus of “Someone Like You,” or the off-pitch singing of John Lennon during “In My Life.” It’s Kanye at the end of “Runaway,” Whitney Houston’s high notes during the chorus of “I Will Always Love You,” and Frank Ocean when he shifts into an unexpected falsetto. These musical moments give us chills because they focus our attention on those notes we never saw coming. They amplify the mystery.
X. As Kanye observes, there’s often a hidden cost to this kind of aesthetic innovation: “If you guys want these crazy ideas and these crazy stages and this crazy music and this crazy way of thinking, there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person.”
CHAPTER 4 STRATEGIC OPACITY
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.
—PHILIP ROTH, American Pastoral
Only Muggles talk of “mind reading.” The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter.
—J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Or Not To Be
In the late 1590s, William Shakespeare’s touring company was locked in a fierce competition for ticket sales. Another troupe had just built a theater across the Thames; their light comedies were, as Shakespeare had one of his characters lament, “now the fashion.”1 He must have worried that his own company would soon be forced to close.
Shakespeare’s solution was new material. To speed up the writing, he decided to adapt an old Scandinavian fable starring a prince named Amleth.2 It seemed like a safe choice: this story had been performed on the stage a few years before and been a hit. Shakespeare had almost certainly seen the previous version. Some scholars believe he might even have acted in it.3
The story begins with the murder of a king, assassinated by his power-hungry brother. The king’s son wants justice, and thus blood. The only problem is that everyone knows about the murder—it is a public fact—so Prince Amleth has to hide his fury. To avoid suspicion, he fakes insanity. Once his uncle believes Amleth to be a harmless lunatic, the young man burns down the palace and reclaims the throne.
The tale of the vengeful prince had been told this way for hundreds of years.4 But Shakespeare decided to make one crucial alteration. In his adaptation of the story, the murder of the king is a secret. (Everyone thinks he died of a serpent bite.) When the play begins, even the son is in the dark.
This might seem like a minor change, but Shakespeare surely grasped the consequences. For one, it transforms Hamlet from a transparent assassin—revenge is all he wants—into a walking riddle. If the king isn’t worried about Hamlet’s retribution, then why is he pretending to be crazy? Why is he wasting time with all these soliloquies? Why doesn’t he just get on with the killing? Before long, these questions lead us to question the prince’s actual sanity; we have lost track of how mad he really is. (It’s not clear Hamlet knows, either.) Shakespeare has turned a character defined by the most primal motivation into one that’s impossible to understand.
This was a strange way of telling a story, especially for a playwright obsessed with commercial success. It’s easy to imagine the notes Shakespeare might get from a Hollywood studio. Hamlet is too confusing. The audience will get lost. Shakespeare should stick to the story that works.
But Shakespeare knew what he was doing. When it came to his characters, one of Shake
speare’s finest innovations is what he left out, how he removed information until what remained was a mystery. The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt refers to this method as “strategic opacity,” noting how Shakespeare liked to excise “a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold.”5 The playwright took this strategy to a new level in Hamlet, constructing a drama designed to frustrate every explanation.
The strategy worked: Hamlet was a big success, selling out the Globe Theatre in London. What’s more, it marked a decisive turn toward mystery that would define Shakespeare’s later plays. While the playwright had always featured protagonists behaving erratically, most of these crazy characters were crazy in love. (Romeo and Juliet weren’t complicated, just randy.) But Shakespeare’s writing after Hamlet embraced opacity to an unprecedented degree. As Greenblatt notes, in these adapted masterpieces Shakespeare repeatedly “took his source and deftly sliced away what would seem indispensable to a coherent, well-made play.” He removed Iago’s motivation in Othello—he’s now seeking revenge for no particular reason—and deleted the plot point that explains the early actions of King Lear. In Shakespeare’s version, we never know why the old monarch is testing the love of his daughters. The result, writes Greenblatt, is a character whose actions are so arbitrary and haphazard they must be rooted in some “deep psychological needs.”