stages of reception - a funnel the community stage impression builds on existing communities creation of community in hte end of it # Outline of other aspects - not in full depth full album case - when fails to resonate visual media neurodivergence # missed examples > 'so excited just can't hide it' > 'hit the road Jack' # content Emotional Dissonance North of Richmond When imagining a commmunity fails Olivier Anthony's 'Men North Of Richmond' tries to elicit emotions and build community. This post examines when it fails. I rarely discuss philosophy of aesthetics. This is the time. Beside the song by Olivier Anthony himself I will discuss other examples of songs. By "song" I define as a recorded (not improvised) piece of audio with both vocal and instrumental track, between 2 and 6 minutes in length, listened to in solitude or a social setting. This post develops a theory for song creation and reception, discussing various factors behind mismatches. CW suicide # Part 1 - Causes and Factors ## Defining terms We already defined the song, now we need a couple of axes, or properties that a given song has. Let's start with melody, harmony and rhythm - yes music theorists, we're lumping all of these together. By that I mean the entiretly of nonsemantic contents. This includes the voice track. Just try listening to a song in a language that you do not know and effectively that voice becomes just another instrumental track, with no semantic content. Then we have left the semantic content but is that all? In a sense the art of making a song is equivalent to an autoencoder, with two parts - encoder and decoder. That is basic meme theory to be fair. Semantic content is constructed prior to performance, often but not always by the author. That includes the title. The process of construction is the encoding process. Weeks of emotion, work end up as a digital recording and semantic content. What this means is that there are latent intentions of the author hidden in the sound and semantics and their interplay. That gives rise to the discussion of what these latent dimensions of the 'song' object are. I see five of them - yes some are cluster of features and could be divided more, but it is what it is. These are music, semantics, story, emotions elicited and subconscios influence. We're arriving at these in steps. As many were probably waiting to say from the start, the hidden dimension is the author's concept of the song, it is the _telos_ of expressing or impressing an emotion. That is quite similar to painting _impressionism_ and _expressionism_, if you like the lumping style of thought. <!-- lumpers link --> Now what the author had in mind is at least partially obscured. What we know is of the decoding process, what emotion is elicited. Each song can impress multiple emotions in the listener, creating a mix. Yet the space of possible emotions combined in a single song is small as more than 3 is impractical. Now which kinds of emotions are possible here? We might talk in some axes of emotions, but let's focus on those that are the most under pressure from the choice of the medium. There are emotions of different complexity. The simplest and the most immediate are joy of the moment of dance, victory or harvest, sadness of mourning of a loss. Now some song are songs explicitly, but if we take a 'story' to be something in a broad sense, all songs are stories. In that sense a story has characters, and often has counterfactuals. What in cinema would be a subtle wistful look for a departing lover in a song would most likely be more visible. Counterfactuals in visual media are harder to depict - they might be as a dream sequence, or the disparate timeline can be shown for a short while, but it breaks the continuity. Maybe there is a link between language's readiness-to-counterfactuality and development of intelligence. There is no way of making a word take up less auditory space, unlike in visual media, where a scene can have hidden items. Words can be taken to the forefront if they are in the chorus, though. A song does not need to narrate a linear sequence of events. A song can be a snapshot of a key situation exploring potential - not even actualized timelines, hinting at diverse possible backstories. <!-- levitating snapshot --> Let's the British-Albanian singer Dua Lipa's 'Levitating' song. The lyrics is absurdly fantastical, driving a car between galaxies. I love the great album 'Future Nostalgia' by Dua Lipa. In the 'Rich Men North of Richmond' we have several timelines. We have effectively 3 worlds there. There is the doomy reality, there is the wishful thinking of waking up from the nightmare but also the possible different reality. That is the story in the song. In contrast to plot-focused stories this one is a vignette of a particular point in time, and the mood. There are also songs that are dynamic stories - then the chorus is problematic. That could change every time with some words, but if it stays static it's boring. I want to know the story! there we could say that there's a static reality, or just the social / setting backdrop to the story. <!-- big iron reference --> Big Iron story no chorus - the song has a cool story, of arrogance defeated by martial mastery. Here the culture around reception is important - it is a part of the Fallout New Vegas Soundtrack. The experience of a song even if on its own purely narrative is taking on a color of the circumstances of it happening. Big Iron then brings the gamer community together by evoking memories of running across the Mojave desert as Courier 7. Almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter... Beside the emotional impression we have the subconscious priming. That was explored by the anti-cult Christian movements of the 90s and early 00s, looking for subliminal programming in heavy metal and other music. And I am a truther of this theory. Now some people say "bro I can make it personal, it's just so to me I am not under subconscious influence of the heavy metal lyrics." and then proceed to do something satanic. Therefore we have the 5 elemnts of the song 1. music 1. semantics 1. story 1. emotions elicited 1. subconscious influence Now we notice that obviously 4 - emotions elicited - is different depending on the receiver. Let's go deeper into this... ## How we receive emotions from songs? That is a factor of all of the first 3 of the factors. The songs try to elicit emotion. The ideal listener is aligned with these emotions. Now of course, the response will be some distribution curve, yet the Platonic ideal listener exists - it might be 1 SD around the median listener in the listener space, more or less narrow. And insofar as music is a brand-led industry, "brand personas" and "target customer" are definitely created for many successful artists. Now that we established that response will be a mutli-variate distribution not a uniform one we can go into the factors that cause it. Let's start in chronological order. ## Stages of song reception Ok we hear the music, it primes our response to the lyrics - sad melodies have sad lyrics too, but these are not perfectly correlated. Then we hear the sounds, notice semantic / poetic brilliance, intellectualize cultural references, our personal closeness to the story described. As a result, the initial feeling caused by melody is increased or dampened as a result. We can exclude the subconscious influence as having more of a long-term modus operandi. Once we have stages we can trace the 'happy path' for the ideal user... listener. Let's say it's Bob. Bob hears sad tunes and his mood starts contemplative. Then he hears the lyrics. The tone of human voice further deepens his state, and the vivid imagery transports him to a nostalgia-lensed vision full of the good times. He grasps references to pieces of media he consumed as a teenager and the story resonates with him. He's relieving and rewriting a specific portion of his memories - those dealing with the song lyrics topic. What if that fails? If the listener doesn't happen to experience it at a time then it falls flat. if there is 'ludo-narrative dissonance', let's call this poetry-emotional dissonance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative_dissonance That can happen inways too many to outline, I will discuss only some of these. Some stories paint an absurd picture and leave it ambiguous for the reader - is it a tragedy? Is it a comedy? Some mismatch their music with their lyrics, some have dull lyrics. For obvious reasons most of the songs we hear about need to do at least decent at each of the stages of the path. Yet that not all songs have this for isn't for lack of _art_. There are tradeoffs. Some people are pathologically scared of these but these are fair in love, war but also music. But before we go for the tradeoffs, a personal interjection. #### Some authors also leave an impression of being pseudos too far up their asses I don't like art that requires too much of me. It is the duty of the artist to inspire. In lyrics I don't like when you need to hear right every word to get it. A random word sampled in a noisy environment should convey the intent. dissonance. I also dislike when poets say "that's what I feel is right". And outrageously enough they often do not claim divine inspiration, or dream origin. It's just there. I totally get Plato, appeals to emotion unmoderated by discursive reason are disastrous. I'm not saying 'sola ratio', but SO MANY of the emotional poetic musings are deboonked by simple discursive common sense. End of interjection. <!-- button leave a comment --> ## Building community and meaning The tradeoffs are because of Dunbar number and human aggregation dynamics. Basically there will always be a musical ecosystem with niche genres targeted for a specific audience, and more broad genres for all. As musicians have a parasocial relationship with the fans, that is cultivated through all the dynamics of mops and geeks. <!-- mops and geeks --> Shibboleths need to happen, signals and countersignals, all of it is there in the music. Obiously cultural understanding of references requires cultural literacy. A poem only vaguely referncing some parable by Jesus will not be understood by someone to whom Christian culture is unknown. Similar logic applies to events known to people in a given musical scene, scandals, et cetera. For an example - recall how I gave praise to Dua Lipa's album 'Future Nostalgia'. OTOH one other song on the album does not quite resonate with me - 'Boys will be boys'. It establishes a community of women-listeners who are put at unease during the night walk home on seeing men in the dark. I am not one of those and I do not have a daughter. And also I don't think that's an issue of "men" behaving better but social policy. Now the mood - if we're only having one mood at a time, we have more moods _nearby_ emotional time - smaller moods that we experienced recently or even bigger moods that took place more in the past. It is reasonable that if experiences are described, relatability of these will impact our emotional perception. Not only that but also if the song describes a struggle that is not known to us personally, it can resonate if a person or a group we're close to shares it. #### How does a song work with these exactly? A song, especially if it is a novel one, references existing communities and adds a new layer onto them - the new community It is very - Wittgensteinian - that sense meaning of an expression is only legible in its community. We can also use the term 'Imagined Community' where space and distance in a nation contract, giving the listener, or reader a neat Dunbar-number compliant pantheon of national heroes, easily treated as the 150th person you're familar with and thinking about. A song creates its imagined community - a fanbase - through a collage of these references. <!-- imagined community link --> Let's use the 'Rich Men North Of Richmond' as an example. ### How this applies to the song at hand 'Rich Men North Of Richmond' obviously capitalized on the 'personal closeness' aspect, the shared cultural identity of young men in rural America. The first 2 lines of the chorus: > It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to / For people like me and people > like you The community of course is those who are dissatisfied with the status quo. Now who does he represent? What is he like? Who is he speaking to? The answer to all of these is one cluster in personality space. Not all songs have these - most notably Britney Spears' "Piece of Me" - apparently addressed to her critics and commentators - of course to her fans as well, promoting her rebellious image. What are the features of this cluster beyond feeling shame over the world? Being close to personal hardship, tragedy and loss. He is good at this - for me personally that is the heardest bit of the whole song: > Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground \ 'Cause all this damn > country does is keep on kickin' them down Now suicide hits people knowing the person deeply and the effects ripple. We are never more than two or three degrees of separation from someone who lost a close one in this way. Using "the dead" in general, individuals unaffiliated with one's cause for poltical ends is deplorable. But this case is an edge on so I'm not judging too harshly. Finally we have the world-image, it is quite enchanted indeed. He as a poet of course has an overly romanticized image and a bias against action. > Livin' in the new world \ With an old soul And this line after a gloomy description: > Wish I could just wake up and it not be true \ But it is, oh, it is The old soul personality cluster is low energy. Complaining over doing. Not 'clearpilled' into stoic inaction either - which I don't agree with either, but respect more. <!-- old soul personality link --> And are old souls self-medicating alcoholics? That's what he's making it sound like! > So I can sit out here and waste my life away \ Drag back home and drown my > troubles away Is the telos of the song Eastern-Euroization of the American South? That was the fate of half of the continent after the Empire of USSR broke down, so that might actually be in the cards for the US in the future too, maybe that's a phantom he's referencing? Finally we have the final description - the enemy. Who do you consider your political enemy matters a lot. Millions of votes have been cast merely against a greater evil, not for any particular good. <!-- to know a man know his enemies --> The descriptors of the oppressors are 3: class (rich), gender (men), north of Richmond (geographical indicator). Both the class and geography hint at Washington and a quasi-Marxist focus on the material wellbeing. Seeing the world through primarily economic axis is not the rugged individualism of Jordan Peterson. That is a lower middle class populist vibe he's going after. Now the gender is the interesting one. If a female feminist sang this the rest of the lyrics might have been about some irreconciliable difference, a feminine lived experience that is _othered_. The oppressing side here is sharing the male dimension. That creates a more _bitter_ taste. The grounds for this is: > These men are similar to me, yet they are not good Kantians, I in their place > would be better. He is more in the Founding Fathers egalitarianism-opposed-to-aristocracy-and-monarchy mindset than other-perspectives-need-voicing-merely-for-being-different. I'll leave you to your own conclusions with this one. That might be more of 'fraternite' moment than 'egalite'. <!-- egalite link --> In any case, it's not clearpilled. Elves cannot befriend hobbits at scale. <!-- Yarvin link --> ## Summary of the cluster After this analysis we can see that the target listener has these features: 1. doomer 1. close to hardship 1. 'old soul' (low energy) 1. economic concerns dominate 1. expects brotherhood from the elites That's enough of an explanation of how community cultural mismatch causes emotional dissonance. Let's briefly see some alternative ones. # Part 2 - Other Factors These are some additional aspects that I will cover only in passing. Yet these form an outline for possible future development on this and form predictions for this theory, making it falsifiable. Firstly, two songs well received on their own might cause dissonance when juxtaposed. ## Full albums case Imagine you're listening to an album that was in a mildly happy mood, about small happy moments. Your emotions are in sync with it. There is a flow. Then the next song is really sad. You're confused. Why could this happen? There is an assymmetry between the author and the listener. The author spent weeks or months creating the palate of experiences in each song. These could be a roller coaster of emotions and aesthetics. Each of the vocal tracks and melodies corresponds to some sphere of life, set of memories for the writer and / or singer. The listener, on the other hand is new to this combination of sounds and words. Unless a lucky context alignment is found - references to common mythology, or an emotional chord is struck, we won't get engrossed into the song. Now let's jump to even broader and more different context - visual media. ## Visual media difference If we recall fom the sections above, a song puts together many references, feelings and identities to creaft a new thing. That new thing is limited by dimensions of the song. A movie can do the same thing, but has bigger dimensions, so the identities it creates are stronger. Note how people are fans of bands or singers, rarely specific songs. It's parasocial. For movies the character is often contained within one work of art - the movie itself. See 'American Psycho'. Of course a movie can still fail at this if it's a mere collection of back references, fan service and cameos. Many 'stuck-culture' syndrome reboots and remakes have this. A meme ('an image macros' for the nitpicky) is on the other end of the spectrum - it's much smaller than either song or a movie, it relies almost exclusively on references. Memes are not a homogenous population, some are high context some are low. Their flow between generations is limited, they are fast-paced. Finally and most importantly they are under much more intense selection pressures. Even if a movie is a flop still millions will have heard of it during the promotion. Movies from the past are also selected for the Lindy factor by the masses who re-watch them. Memes replicate through selection - there is no one with multi-million budget who could make a centrally enforced meme. Unless we're schizo enough, but the three latter agencies would need to make a whole memeplex that's competitive, so that meme would be part of it. Lastly of the visual arts I'd put performative arts, more narrowly dance. We can connect this to the prior discussion of songs. A good dancer relays the vibe of the music, reflects its mood through interpretation in movement and pushes it forward - for instance to deaf people who otherwise would be walled away from the vibe in the music. After the 3 examples of visual scenarios let's return to the listener-subject. ## Possible neurodivergence as cause You might not perceive the emotions in a song well beecause your drivers are incompatible. Drivers for social interaction namely. That's just a hypothesis. Music, social event, serotonin - disruption of social hormonal pathways might well impact individual reception of music. Neurotypicals (sorry for the slur) might make emotions tunable to the hive mind. We can make a hypothesis that how often one does participate in a thing like method acting or improv increases this suggestability. Acting as someone else is inherently dissociative, but it sounds like a deeper way to experience the story emotionally, get more immersed. Acting is also high status in many circles, but for me acting some random guy in pre-school theatre wasn't a good idea. Hypnotic suggestability should also be correlated with emotional switching speed. Or maybe the resistance to switch emotions is more schizoid than autistic. Here I can speak from experience. I am in fact freakishly cautious about being influenced mentally. That's why I am become Doxometrist, the measurer of opinions (doxa). I dislike radio and obvious lifestyle nudges employed there. I feel always on my guard. In reading I have control in my attention over the text - I can re-read, re-examine it. Speech goes and is forever lost. I might be nudged towards something but later not notice it. Permitting myself to be influenced by simple words of a song full of joy - such as Dua Lipa's 'Levitating' - sooner. More complex trigger my caution, I don't want my emotions hijacked by agents with unknown purposes. ## Summary Here you have it, the outline of a theory of song production and perception through the community lens. Of course this is just a subset of memetics, a particular theory of memetics. Each new medium introduces new patterns of dissemination and biases about content. I think my lack of sympathy towards such poetic types is visible. Not to say I cannot see good in the merits of people that sometimes write poetry, when they do other things. I also examined the specific piece of media that is Olivier Anthony's recent work - "Rich Men North Of Richmond". Let me reiterate this: it is doomer, populist in the most unproductive sense of the word, ignoring the cultural divisions in the country and pretends not to understand that elites really cannot be too much like him. This is a test as far as commentary on current events go, I had to join it with the theory bit. Let me know what you think about the commentary at all, and about the style of joining it with theory. I was considering doing 2 posts, one theory one for practice so tell me if that would have been better. Upcoming posts - I'm on the finish line of the pagan/acc cycle. A new cycle will continue, a much more philosophical one. That's all I'm saying now. Subscribe to see it.