I would look at it this way: Let's define entropy as the amount of disorder in a system. In music, what are we actually doing? We are selecting certain notes to play at certain times, from the set of all possible notes and times. I guess music at maximum entropy would be playing random notes at random intervals -- maybe we'd just call it "noise," then. So by creating music, we are in a sense ordering the frequencies into specific groups and time intervals. We are locally decreasing entropy by creating a piece of music. Of course, that creation process requires energy which we get from the food we eat (and now, the electricity we produce), so it seems that the conservation of entropy would still hold. We aren't changing the overall energy balance of the universe, just increasing the overall entropy through waste heat in order to produce a low-entropy state in a local system. Just like when we build a house from raw materials, I guess.
max entropy of an audio file would be an entirely random audio file, ie white noise. when played, it would create the most entropy in its physical environment. the least entropy would be all the same level, ie a silent audio file. when played, it would only create the entropy of the decoding process, ie the computer doing the decoding. we're not talking about decreasing entropy, just the relative amount of increase.
@@laurenpinschannelsYes the same level but any given level is equivalent. Just to clarify for others that a silent audio file is no more or less entropic than any monotone audio file.
There's a problem with that theory: Why isn't "Imagine" by John Lennon any more disordered than "non musical" notes and chords being played? It's only more orderly to the human mind. In fact, there's nothing measurably different between the two. Indeed, a single note being played in tune for the entire length of a song would be much more mathematically orderly than anything Beethoven or Prince wrote. No. Music is just information, ultimately. And you can make awful music in a non random, orderly way just as some of the best music is distorted, atonal, offbeat, unpredictable, and chaotic. The only real entropy is in sound...and that isn't realized until the primary waves have been absorbed by solids after reverberating and travelling in some cases far from the source, alas. Now, if you want a more interesting (in my opinion) thermodynamic property of music, look up *"availability"*.
@@mc2engineeringprof right. look up videos about percolation by spectral collective and edge of criticality in the brain by artem kirsanov. complex things generally happen at middling entropy.
Hey Benn, as a casual viewer who enjoys all your content (though rarely understands it all), these science discussion videos you do are by far my favorite. Were it somebody else presenting the information I probably wouldn't be quite as interested, you'd make a great teacher!
I agree but it would be difficult finding students with the interest and FOCUS to sit still, listen, absorb and appreciate. I hope Benn keeps trying and feeding us hungry fans out here!
@@marctestarossaThe joke is that someone who sat through the video is good at focusing. If ADHD were a condition that could be treated with a blood transfusion, people who are good at concentrating would be ideal donors. It's not a joke based in reality, it's more absurd than anything else. I have ADHD and I had no problem sitting through the video, because music and science are two of my biggest interests.
@stoneysdead689 I think it's so bizarre when people make these sorts of comments digging at teachers like that. It's like, just because you can't exactly remember being personally emotionally affected by something from a lecture however many years ago vs something you literally just watched seconds prior doesn't mean your professor did a poor job.
@@KarlMarcus8468Actually, on specifically the topic of entropy, teachers and professors are notoriously bad at explaining this concept. Nearly a decade of physics+engineering classes with some fantastic teachers and professors, and it still took years more of thinking and UA-cam videos to somewhat grasp it. I hope that with the internet how it is now (vs. how it was 20 years ago), students are able to grasp the concept quicker.
If you never say which definition of entropy you're using you can say anything you want about it. Like that a forest is more entropic than a house for example.
Benn i gotta be real for a second dude, Videos like this is why i keep coming back and appreciate you as content creator, musician but just overall human being man. You always present interesting topics that not a lot of people seem to put thought to. So Thanks Benn thank you for always asking questions no matter how random cause it helps us all learn in different ways. So thank my G
I was reading about an African tribe that would play the drums every day from the day that they could even hold one. They said that they believe each rhythm they create helps them with a different aspect of life, and learning to weave different polyrhythms together helps the brain peice together puzzles and look at the world differently.
I think we'd get along in real life if this is how your conversations really go. I too think that music is the driver to so much of human evolution. From pushing us to develop science to make better instruments or understand the sounds... to thought experiments about entropy. Great stuff and thanks for the food for thought.
The last 4 minutes of the video was the discussion I was hoping for. I would be very interested in hearing more of your thoughts on the life-affirming powers of music and musicianship for communally refining the cognitive, social, and existential fluency needed for authentically orienting our creativity in response to the global crises defining our time. Thanks for sharing.
That is so interesting. I wish I could have conversations about things like this, I just don't know others who do so this is great because you work so hard at covering stuff it's a very acceptable way to learn. Thanks as always man!
This is such an interesting channel thank you for doing research in sound lol never thought I needed this man your channel is such a breath of fresh air and well presented. Glad to have found this
I'm digging your videos lately. Great stuff! I really like how politely you can be critical. Everyone should be that way but I appreciate it anyhow.😊 Sometimes when I'm improvising lead guitar I feel like a 'vent' steering the sound on its way to the amplifier and beyond. Until the sound waves well, you know. The state of mind is indeed difficult to explain. 2 systems ' colliding '(?) it's a weird place to be.
The first time I heard of entropy it was explained (or I got it) as a measure of the disorder (just as temperature could be the measure of ammount of heat) and further investigating I came to understand that the more information, or vectors, at play, or let's say, are introduced in the scheme, the more probability for "disorder", or the more a system gets away from it's initial order. That fits well my notion of entropy in music (specially in composing).
Usually, I think the opposite of your entropy happens..... U hear a song on the radio, for example. It means nothing. But then after u hear it a few times, it sticks in your head. Then, u go to a birthday party, like your examples, & listen to the song with a few friends while having a great experience, now it means something to u- it reminds u of that experience, or that friend, then years later, u hear it again, & its emotional, reminding u of those better times, or now one of those friends has passed away & its a fond memory, and so on....
Thank you brother for sharing your thoughts on such a deep topic. When I think of “entropy” I think of a state of being where every thing is disordered, where there is more instability within the system. The opposite of this state would be a state that is more coherent. And from coherence comes resonance.This is the spectrum that I see entropy playing in my reality. So when I apply this to music I am witnessing the expression of intention through vibration, it is in fact the language of the human soul. Which is why it has been used for spiritual and ceremonial purposes for all of human history. There is in fact a much deeper process that is happening here, that allows music to bridge the physical and non-physical. I think your crystal analogy is closer to the truth. I transmit my intention through vibration, which informs and entrains your system on how it should be (bypassing the mind). This lowers the disordered entropic state of consciousness, creating coherence and resonance. Which in turn connects us to spirit and to each other.
Benn your music has manifested such a major part of my life and I was hoping you see what I'm writing. Thanks for everything you've done for music and life itself. Your impact can't be understated.
I can imagine that holding a note for a long time will entropy. Your voice will start to crack & lose volume or breathe, the longer u hold it. Or play it on an instrument. There's an Example of entropy in music. Or the more times u play a record, (or CD, I guess), the more used up & scratched, or whatever, (I dunno much about records, lol), and falls apart, & doesn't sound as clear
I love that you touched on how the concept of entropy is approached and then avoided in geological self-organizing processes like the formation of banding in agate development (without specifically mentioning self-organization in agate crystal formation).
I am midway thro your vid and looked up entropy. I previously thought it had a tight definition, but that’s only in the context of quantifying the thing in thermodynamics. Once you branch away from this, it’s about the ‘disorderliness’ of ‘stuff’. That everything tends to slowly decay into chaos. So, it’s easy to say that lashings of reverb and then playing many more notes than are musical, clearly leads to that discordant mess we’ve all had when just messing about with an instrument and reverb or delay/echo effects. In fact, there are songs I’ve heard where the outro is in effect, a cacophony or absolute dog’s dinner of sound. The descent into this, is well-recognised as a way of wrapping up a big rock number, that last-chord thrashing while the drummer goes nuts behind and the bassist hammers the ‘hawsers’ to make an absolute climactic racket. Usually there’s then a sudden ‘twang’ of the lead guitar and all goes silent followed by hopefully rapturous applause?! But, as soon as we move off a specific instance of entropy like that, I’m lost, so hey, I might as well watch the rest of your musing Benn. Take care all - 2024 has all the hallmarks of being as entropic as sh!t.
That "CS definition" is actually the physics definition on the most fundamental level. If you're building a heat pump or doing something else applied, you'll use the definition that's concerned with the spread of energy, but that definition reduces at a fundamental level to the "CS" one that describes probability distributions.
here we go! scrolled through to find someone saying this. yup. for those following along at home, for a quick intro read ch2 of Elements of Information Theory, it's not too bad and it's on your favorite textbook website
Hey Ben, I’d like to give my thoughts on defining music entropy, as a student studying both physics and classical Horn Performance in college. Going off the classic “microstates per macrostate” definition, you could define the macrostate as the action of performing a particular piece, in general. Then you define the microstates as individual instances of you performing that same piece. You could measure the entropy, by taking many samples of you playing that piece, (one macrostate) and measure the variance among your performances (all individual microstates). While you can’t count every possible microstate, like one would in thermodynamics, you might be able to compare the audio files and analyze how similar or different they are from one another. High variety in performance would correspond to low entropy, and low skill. Thus, low variance in performances would be low entropy, and signify a master who’s able to consistently execute something well.
❤ It's a mark of your wide ranging interest that you came to having a discussion with yourself about entropy and music. I follow several channels concerned with such phenomena, including Veritasium. It would never occur to me to exercise my mind in linking concepts in music and the concept of entropy. I hope your summing up at the end of the video where you conceded a general acceptance of the complexity of the question you asked and the broader need to let go and relax in order that music can flow. We put energy into making music we put energy into systems capable of producing and of reproducing music. Music comes out and goes away. We have to put more energy in to get more music out of the same system or a adifferent system. Our auditory systems use energy to translate received sound waves for our brains to process. We might input energy to draw the attention of others or to try to stop the music. The emotional aspects of the music process all require energy input in order to express those emotions. When we no longer have energy to input, our making and appreciation of music winds down to nothing, just like the old grammophone.
This becomes a spiritual question. How did humans come into being in the first place? It was not through entropy. There is a creative organizing spiritual force in the universe that creates and increases complexity against the grain of physical entropic laws. I'm not religious, but in that way we are indeed made in God's image. We are, as with all biological beings, an inexplicable outgrowth of creation and the primary driving force of existence as a whole. It's Yin and Yang. Chaos and Order. Music and art is a creative endeavor as creation is "god's" creative endeavor. It's why when we create, we feel closer to that essence force and peace. It's flow state. We are in closer alignment with something beyond what we can measure in physical terms.
Awesome video. I really enjoy your enthusiasm, and your humor and your dedication to explaining things in the best way possible so as to make them more ingestible for the masses is inspiring and appreciated. Thank you for your efforts and your contributions.
This video gives voice to a question I've had for a long time, and the question has flavored everything I do for a few years now. This might be leaning into pseudoscience/metaphysics/philosophy, but I've always conceptualized entropy as the universe's propensity (I think of it a desire/intention) to "learn" to fulfill more states, to discover more ways of being. In a phrase, "entropy is the universe's desire to make as many things happen as possible." So when things like crystals, music, systems, all pop up in what is popularly thought of to be a chaotic universe, the crystallization of a structure allows for more rapid discovery of new states, or in other words, the universe is learning to fulfill more states, and is getting better at it. I've always wondered if that learning is a facet of entropy, if not fundamentally what entropy is. Again, this is pretty esoteric, but I don't believe in coincidences. Maybe that's my pattern recognizing brain trying to shoehorn meaning where there is none, but I'd feel remiss to not share.
I would definitely hang out with you, the next round is on me. What I think about entropy in music is the fact that a set gets better and better with time, at the end of the concert it gets wild. On another scale and I felt it when you were talking in the woods, at 15:15 in this unscripted but amazingly editied video, music has to be richer than the previous one, with more notes, more chords, more ideas. Music is life.
I think music entropy is when all of the noises and permutations and configurations of noises have been played and heard and there is no longer any truly new music
Whoa that’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand. I got enough time and brain space for work, family and listening to, and playing music. I wish you all the best in figuring out the science behind it all.
Great question. I hope the answer is yes. That's why I started building my synth. I'm not talented at all, but one day I want to finish a good song. Until then I try to defy entropy by sharing my eurorack modules.
It feels like music or the capacity to make it wouldn’t occur (statistically impossible) unless it increased entropy overall. I think that music helps humans coordinate, cooperate, and socially learn better. But this helps us extract extremely energy dense resources, or deal with the consequences of an extremely energy intensive society. The amount of energy it takes to produce a song on an electric guitar, edit it, publish it, stream it, remix it is orders of magnitude more than the energy required to sing a song, or play a flute. Even if music is highly ordered like a crystal, it’s ultimately just going to increase entropy or aid humans in radiating heat more efficiently.
it's all about the relative amount of entropy increase. adding silence adds 0 entropy. adding white noise adds the maximum addable entropy at a given signal level. adding music adds a signal that is middling between those extremes. a reasonable approximation of entropy of a sound file is how big the compressed version of it is (and this is not a coincidence, read Elements of Information Theory ch2 and ch5 to properly understand why this is the case, it's on whatever your favorite textbook website is)
oh also, if you want to do the entropy of a score, try running the midi file through brotli or zstd (or just gzip or zip). any of those compressors will give you a relative estimate of the number of bits of entropy needed to encode the file. then you can compare it to another score. your favorite scores probably have middling entropy.
If u can't find meaning in a song you like then stop. Stop doing whatever you are doing and sit down put on some good headphones, maybe use some nice speakers and... just listen to it. I have found myself feeling everything I liked on a song time and time again by making it the central atraction and not a distraction to a boring task. Also close your eyes while you hear it. It helps a lot to focus
I love that both you and Cameron worked "superposition" into your new videos. What are the odds? Well, seeing as the probability collapsed to a certainty, I guess it's 100%.
what a coincidence! I'm just reading The Information by James Gleick which has got some really interesting information on entropy in physics, in information theory etc. Nice to hear your musings on this in a totally different context!
16:08 This in particular made me laugh the most because I had paused and skipped back in the video at least 20 times due to being distracted by something else, but wanting to go back and properly listen to what you were saying because it was interesting. Great video.
I'd say a quick way to relate entropy to a common music producer problem is Writer's Block. That feeling of getting stuck, spinning the wheels of a composition with the ever growing feeling that you won't be able to get it back to an enjoyable state. And the crystal analogy is what tied this all together. If you think back to how musical ideas are discovered or created, you put yourself at a huge advantage of breeding new seeds to sow. Creating that momentum that you may have lost on a stale project.
Bela Bartok (also regarded as the father of ethnomusicology) in his research about folkloric roots in music (spoiler warning) arrived at a standstill. in a pretty reductive way it's really hard to pinpoint the origin of something, so in a way we are just spectators on how chaos turns into order, and viceversa. Let alone if you add variables like perception, memory, their coding/decoding and the reconstruction of all that chaotic data. Without memory there's no music, and for you dear reader, the memory will fade someday.
Very nice essay. You pointed to the key for understanding how we humans wrap our minds around the absolute which we can't know: using metaphors. We can't escape it. Just refine (e.g. science) our metaphors. Which is also entropic :)
I'm no physycist, nor mathematician and You may be on drugs, but totaly right about the music helping us out😉 BTW I really do enjoy talking about entropy as well with engineers, other musicians, family or even with complete strangers.
Hi, I give a lot of consideration to entropy myself, and used to play around with the notion in a philosophical way. Interesting take about entropy of music. I would suggest a categorisation: entropy of music in general, then entropy of a song is an abstratct and because is not a phisical object until plaid it normaly does not experience entropy, as long as infomation is preserved. Any effect of the song like emotion in listener is a second system, and everytime is listened adds something new. In this regard effect has negative entropy but as the law sais for negative entropy we put energy in(playing, listneing, interpreting or integrating the song. To add on entropy, i am also looking at it from a perspective of purpose of the universe, and in thia entropy law lays a big clue about it all, and it's not the distruction of everything if left alone but more like the necessity to do something about it. Is more like the shark built to swim in order to stay alive. Thanks for the videos I enjoy them very much. cheers.
I always think of Entropy, in very general terms, as moving from a state of High to Low Potential. For me that is the easiest way to conceptualise it for the majority of situations to which the term might apply. I don't know how accurate it is tho, as a layman. But be it thermal dynamics,, chemistry, psychology or even crystals it seems to work.
As often as I wonder if that spark of emotion is felt by most everyone via music, I find just talking about it or hearing others talk about it comes so close to a similar feeling; true understanding through a language. Music just seems unique in the fact that you don't need to be able to speak the language to understand it, but I guess you could also relate that to spoken language in the fact that you can understand the language but may not be able to read it? Music is just so special, and almost everyone coasts through life without realizing it's real significance.
Very interesting hypotheses. I like how your brain works. In my younger days, I was capable of entertaining new theories of speculations I had created by combining knowledge from different disciplines, from broad areas of interest, commingling specific knowns from different fields into something new. Creatives do this as a natural function of their being. Their openness & interest in new information & how that information may be applied is a natural byproduct of their curious minds. Since it may be apparent that even as I've gained new knowledge, this capacity for creative theorizing across disciplines has waned, that that itself may be an example of Entropy.
Seems like you might get more paydirt digging in Hegelian Metaphysics- specifically in his understanding of the dialectic applied to history. Thank you for your videos. I like them
Very interesting video. I had some thoughts about it while watching. I think that everything is entropic but that sometimes nature has mechanisms that try to organize things with all of this new entropic material around. It seems like that is what humanity's role in entropy is. Or any intelligent species for that matter. To organize disorder and to find patterns.
It’s 2024 and I’m starting my day by watching a video on musical entropy. Not sure why but I’m here for it! 💪🏽 Eccentric Scientist Benn > Gear Reviewer Benn. 🙌🏽
I can add some perspective to this subject I believe. My educational background is in Computer Science. But I had several experiences in my life that took me on a deep dive into Abnormal Psychology, and a disorder known as DID. There, I learned something about the nature of the mind that truly challenged my ability to absorb and understand these experiences. Now that I am more comfortable with my understanding, and I've come to a place where it all really makes a lot of sense, it's equally challenging to approach the concept of fully explaining all of this to another person. I think the simple way to summarize my conclusion is this... we are a 'system' made up of 'parts'. When we look at the physical body, that much is obvious. But when you examine how the mind works, and how our personality is formed, you begin to appreciate we ourselves are not as 'singular' as we might seem. Much like a computer might have a singular processor, but multiple cores doing the work internally. An easy way to convey the intuition of how our mind & personality is structured, might be an orange. An orange appears to the outside world to be a singular structure. But if you peel it, you see that it exists in sections held together by membrane. Our personality is made up of parts that are fractal in nature. More complex parts, made of parts, made of parts, that become less complex in themselves the deeper you go. It mirrors the same sort of pattern of generational evolution we see in computer programming languages. Layers of various generations of languages that allow us to communicate with computers.... binary machine code, assembly, block structured, domain specific, and then high level languages such as C++. Our mind, and our personality exists in layers of parts that have their own unique perspective and experience based memories, through which our current experiences are filtered and funneled to a singular conclusion. When things seem more chaotic, it's because the nuances are more fully absorbed and saturated in the mind, the variations are fully realized, and at some point our mind works these details and nuances through our collective 'multiplicity' of parts, to the point where we have a more rounded and singular consensus of how we should perceive the experience. Another simple way to say this is that nature is chaotic, but our minds work to make sense of it, thereby allowing us to perceive order in more natural chaos. Science teaches us that we each individually experience our own version of 'reality'. We might both hear & see the same bird singing a song, but due to variations in distances, and corresponding differences in the time it takes the sound & light waves carrying that data to our senses, we ultimately do not experience the exact same reality. Given that's the case, 'reality' is therefore always based on perspective of past events. We can never actually see something in the current moment of time, thus we are technically always see stuff as it occurred in the past, and basing our perceptions / reality on our own unique 'history'.
Not the term is going to last through the period when we get a deeper understanding of whatever it’ll be called in the future, but you’re doing that because you’re neurodivergent. You’re whole intro and the ensuing delve is 100% relatable.
In thermodynamics, enthalpy, is the sum of a thermodynamic system's internal energy and the product of its pressure and volume. It is a state function used in many measurements in chemical, biological, and physical systems at a constant pressure, which is conveniently provided by the large ambient atmosphere. I think this may be something we need to consider.
Something that helps with understanding entropy is a simpler definition of it: it's measurement of the rate of change. Words like "orderly" and "disorderly" are too subjective and relative to the state of something else, so they just end up making the idea more confusing than it ought to be. Something with High Entropy is changing its state very rapidly in a given time unit, while Low Entropy is a steady unchanging state. Things usually just move from one steady state to another when something inacts on them, so often when charting entropy you get bell curves as the entropy increases (there's a lot of changes going on) and then decreases again as the new steady state is reached (the changes have basically stopped).
The last thing you said about music being an attempt at ordering chaos (paraphrasing you here) made me think of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. This is from the wiki page about the book: Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally based self esteem, which Becker calls "heroism": a "defiant creation of meaning" expressing "the myth of the significance of human life" as compared to other animals. This counters the personal insignificance and finitude that death represents in the human mind.
I agree with your final points about music, but I think there is an additional perspective. I see how music and crystals relate to each other in this context, but I think that music is also a reflection of our minds. Minds "defy" entropy in much the same way that music, and crystals do. PS: I'm 52, and I've been playing guitar since I was 16. When I first started, learning seemed agonisingly slow, then it sped up for a while around the age of 18, then slowed for a few years, sped up again roundabout the age of 22, then slowed again, then faster in my early to mid 30s, afterwards slowing down until I hit 40,...and then I went through a few years where a whole bunch of stuff that I could never play properly before, suddenly all fell into place, and I'd have to say that was the fastest, biggest learning patch of my guitar playing life. The rate has slowed again from about 2016, mostly because other things in life got in the way, but in 2021 I started writing more and better songs than I have ever written before, and much of it in genres that I have never written in before. Just thought I'd share.
I often struggle with the feeling that I don't want to listen to my favorite songs too often for fear of "wearing out" the song and how I perceive and enjoy it. Maybe that "wearing out" of a song in my brain is musical entropy?
Create a 64 step sequence that starts with a cromatic scale. Apply a 50% probablility that each note will move a half step up or down on each loop. Eventually the pattern will appear completely random. It's possible it could eventually produce the cromatic scale again, but the odds are extremently low.
I think about entropy (and by extension time, gravity) a lot too, perhaps it is the ultimate indirect purpose of all life or things in the universe, to act as the agents of chaos and bring about the eventual heat death of the universe by utlizing all workable energy. I've wondered how to explore it musically but not been able to express it properly yet.
PS - Benn, I don't know if I will ever get the chance to hang out with you. That being said, I consider you one of the most real and interesting people I have never physically met.
I don’t know if it’s accurate but the way entropy made most sense to me was that theres a lot more ways for a room to be messy than there is for it to be clean
The basic question of "how would we measure that?" is quite strange in the context of music. One interpretation could be, does music get more chaotic (follows less musical rules?) or do we invent new rules to follow that include new ways of making music? how do we quantify this or can we even? Should we just look at music that is popular or gets voted as popular or everything that people create? The way people learn to make music did change a lot and the rules they are using are different from past generations. overall lots of things to think about.
As PhD Chemist I love this video 😂 - Benn, we should once meet in real life. Pretty often I think that we are both pretty broadly interested people - I began with drawing painting and science and started making music much later.
I DID make it to the end and found this a fascinating, if somewhat esoteric, line of questioning. The drop of colouring in the water gave me an idea to consider what the line of entropy might be. The nexus of a song (or any creative idea in the mind of the artist...let's call it a spark) is that drop of colour just as it forms before meeting into the water. The entropy starts (drop meets water)at the point where the artist formulates a mechanism to attempt to express that initial spark into the physical world to allow sharing.( Lets face it, squeezing strings against wood is a fairly poor way to express an idea or emotion but we make the best of it.) Drop meets water. Entropy continues as the initial spark is diluted by the physical limitations used to express the spark to others and continues to dilute as other people interact with the "art" and may or may not feel what the initial spark was. The spark spreads out in the "water" and while maintaining it's initial "colour" is "diluted" by the individual responses to engaging with the art. Each interaction is it's own micro state. And so on... Like I said...esoteric. Perhaps I'm the one on drugs! (LOL)
I always thought of entopy as the inverse of order/energy concentration. Take the example of food. When youre in your room with a burger (assume your room is a closed system) your room has some ammount of total order and energy. Some areas of your room have higher concentrations of order and energy like your phone or the burger. When you eat the buger you have systems inside of yourself that convert the burger into other usefull types of energy. Say after eating the burger you decide to clean you room, in doing so you increase the order of your room and decrease the entropy of your room so it looks like the order in your room has increased HOWEVER the work you did used energy that had to come from somewhere. You used the highly concentraded energy source of the burger, you broke it down and used its energy to drive your muscles in moving yourself and the mess in your room arround. So the concenctrated energy of the burger has been distributed by you arround your room. You diffused the concentration of energy in the burger.
Particularly about the impressions and descriptions of music, but in general about the whole video, take a look, if you dare, into the phenomenology of Charles S. Peirce. Papers on Peircean semiotics and music would be a nice entry point. I think you'll enjoy it. 💌
I enjoy a good ramble, thank you. I wonder if the form of highest entropy audio is white noise and the lowest entropy is a single frequency sine wave. It seems, from our ears to our experience, via our brain, audio is likely fragmented and recombined into meaning. Every time I get tinnitus, I wonder how much meaning I'm losing.
Just to be a geek, I'm a fan of Kittel&Kroemer's Thermal Physics, myself. On pg.40 (2nd edition), they give a hard definition of entropy as the logarithm of the multiplicity of states. ("Rehandling" the Boltzmann factor in other places so that entropy is simply the logarithm of a big number, the big number being the number of quantum states the system could find itself in.) I like this approach because it helps demystify the thinking around what entropy IS (count all the states, take the log, that's the entropy). Why it's relevant / why we bother to give this number a name, that then becomes a reason to dig in to other statements like the first law (the relationship between entropy, temperature, and energy, among others) and the second law (a consistently observed physical phenomenon of the evolution of certain types of physical systems). I mean, whether entropy is disorder or not, or is a measure of it or not, it's a little toemato-tomatoe. Overall, I think nature is an incredible guide that helped give credibility to the physicist's use of numbers, and, in the case of entropy, that likely in turn helped show others how they could deal with analogous concepts analytically. (Though, I'm no historian of science. I suppose I just like to think that physics "the natural philosophy^tm" was first here, hehe.)
![Moog, Retailers, And Clones [Op-ed]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/PyA7XnqdufI/mqdefault.jpg)
Poor Cameron, he really wanted that ice cube back.
In another timeline he opened the freezer and lo, the icecube had reformed!
Today wasn't a good day
In an infinite universe, the spontaneous creation of a Boltzmann ice cube is eventually possible!
My MCU Villain origin story.
He got that sad puppy look down😂
There should be a lot more casual conversations like this when hanging out with people.
Agreed
When I spent my days hanging out with weed smoking, mushroom eating yogis, this is about how all the conversations went lol.
Can confirm that you do bring up entropy in casual conversation in real life.
This is my favorite popular science channel that isn't a popular science channel. 😊
Edit: Yes, please, more content like this, absolutely!
I would look at it this way: Let's define entropy as the amount of disorder in a system. In music, what are we actually doing? We are selecting certain notes to play at certain times, from the set of all possible notes and times. I guess music at maximum entropy would be playing random notes at random intervals -- maybe we'd just call it "noise," then. So by creating music, we are in a sense ordering the frequencies into specific groups and time intervals. We are locally decreasing entropy by creating a piece of music. Of course, that creation process requires energy which we get from the food we eat (and now, the electricity we produce), so it seems that the conservation of entropy would still hold. We aren't changing the overall energy balance of the universe, just increasing the overall entropy through waste heat in order to produce a low-entropy state in a local system. Just like when we build a house from raw materials, I guess.
max entropy of an audio file would be an entirely random audio file, ie white noise. when played, it would create the most entropy in its physical environment. the least entropy would be all the same level, ie a silent audio file. when played, it would only create the entropy of the decoding process, ie the computer doing the decoding. we're not talking about decreasing entropy, just the relative amount of increase.
@@laurenpinschannelsYes the same level but any given level is equivalent. Just to clarify for others that a silent audio file is no more or less entropic than any monotone audio file.
There's a problem with that theory: Why isn't "Imagine" by John Lennon any more disordered than "non musical" notes and chords being played?
It's only more orderly to the human mind. In fact, there's nothing measurably different between the two. Indeed, a single note being played in tune for the entire length of a song would be much more mathematically orderly than anything Beethoven or Prince wrote.
No. Music is just information, ultimately. And you can make awful music in a non random, orderly way just as some of the best music is distorted, atonal, offbeat, unpredictable, and chaotic.
The only real entropy is in sound...and that isn't realized until the primary waves have been absorbed by solids after reverberating and travelling in some cases far from the source, alas.
Now, if you want a more interesting (in my opinion) thermodynamic property of music, look up *"availability"*.
@@mc2engineeringprof right. look up videos about percolation by spectral collective and edge of criticality in the brain by artem kirsanov. complex things generally happen at middling entropy.
Made me think of this album:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everywhere_at_the_End_of_Time
Hey Benn, as a casual viewer who enjoys all your content (though rarely understands it all), these science discussion videos you do are by far my favorite. Were it somebody else presenting the information I probably wouldn't be quite as interested, you'd make a great teacher!
I agree but it would be difficult finding students with the interest and FOCUS to sit still, listen, absorb and appreciate. I hope Benn keeps trying and feeding us hungry fans out here!
I'm in federal prison right now for breaking the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
“Lisa! In this home we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics”😂
Lol
What???
This is the physics equivalent of outpizza'ing the Hut
i wish my blood could treat ADHD, maybe then i wouldnt have it lmao.
That joke cracked me up. Love these in-depth rants, please keep them coming, Benn!
@@YourMom-zt5zj I have ADHD and I absolutely don't get the joke. Whose blood helps with what?
@@marctestarossaThe joke is that someone who sat through the video is good at focusing. If ADHD were a condition that could be treated with a blood transfusion, people who are good at concentrating would be ideal donors.
It's not a joke based in reality, it's more absurd than anything else. I have ADHD and I had no problem sitting through the video, because music and science are two of my biggest interests.
@@pickyyeeter thanks
Was about to give the comment a like
But I see it’s at 69 likes
& I’m not gonna fuck with that.
How about a thumbs up instead 👍
When the person who wrote the music you listened to in college explains entropy better than your physics professor did in college.
Considering that the definition for entropy he read came directly, word for word, out of a physics textbook- you had a really bad professor.
@stoneysdead689 I think it's so bizarre when people make these sorts of comments digging at teachers like that. It's like, just because you can't exactly remember being personally emotionally affected by something from a lecture however many years ago vs something you literally just watched seconds prior doesn't mean your professor did a poor job.
Scientists and professors are to be thanked for inventing the concept in the first place. ☀️👌🏻
@@KarlMarcus8468Actually, on specifically the topic of entropy, teachers and professors are notoriously bad at explaining this concept. Nearly a decade of physics+engineering classes with some fantastic teachers and professors, and it still took years more of thinking and UA-cam videos to somewhat grasp it. I hope that with the internet how it is now (vs. how it was 20 years ago), students are able to grasp the concept quicker.
If you never say which definition of entropy you're using you can say anything you want about it. Like that a forest is more entropic than a house for example.
Benn i gotta be real for a second dude, Videos like this is why i keep coming back and appreciate you as content creator, musician but just overall human being man. You always present interesting topics that not a lot of people seem to put thought to. So Thanks Benn thank you for always asking questions no matter how random cause it helps us all learn in different ways. So thank my G
I was reading about an African tribe that would play the drums every day from the day that they could even hold one. They said that they believe each rhythm they create helps them with a different aspect of life, and learning to weave different polyrhythms together helps the brain peice together puzzles and look at the world differently.
isn't it proven that drumming makes you "smarter" or something
I think we'd get along in real life if this is how your conversations really go. I too think that music is the driver to so much of human evolution. From pushing us to develop science to make better instruments or understand the sounds... to thought experiments about entropy. Great stuff and thanks for the food for thought.
The last 4 minutes of the video was the discussion I was hoping for. I would be very interested in hearing more of your thoughts on the life-affirming powers of music and musicianship for communally refining the cognitive, social, and existential fluency needed for authentically orienting our creativity in response to the global crises defining our time. Thanks for sharing.
indeed, a most crucial and fascinating topic that is sorely needed to be discussed right now
That is so interesting. I wish I could have conversations about things like this, I just don't know others who do so this is great because you work so hard at covering stuff it's a very acceptable way to learn. Thanks as always man!
This is such an interesting channel thank you for doing research in sound lol never thought I needed this man your channel is such a breath of fresh air and well presented. Glad to have found this
I'm digging your videos lately.
Great stuff!
I really like how politely you can be critical.
Everyone should be that way but I appreciate it anyhow.😊
Sometimes when I'm improvising lead guitar I feel like a 'vent' steering the sound on its way to the amplifier and beyond. Until the sound waves well, you know. The state of mind is indeed difficult to explain. 2 systems ' colliding '(?) it's a weird place to be.
The first time I heard of entropy it was explained (or I got it) as a measure of the disorder (just as temperature could be the measure of ammount of heat) and further investigating I came to understand that the more information, or vectors, at play, or let's say, are introduced in the scheme, the more probability for "disorder", or the more a system gets away from it's initial order. That fits well my notion of entropy in music (specially in composing).
Usually, I think the opposite of your entropy happens.....
U hear a song on the radio, for example. It means nothing. But then after u hear it a few times, it sticks in your head. Then, u go to a birthday party, like your examples, & listen to the song with a few friends while having a great experience, now it means something to u- it reminds u of that experience, or that friend, then years later, u hear it again, & its emotional, reminding u of those better times, or now one of those friends has passed away & its a fond memory, and so on....
Thank you brother for sharing your thoughts on such a deep topic. When I think of “entropy” I think of a state of being where every thing is disordered, where there is more instability within the system. The opposite of this state would be a state that is more coherent. And from coherence comes resonance.This is the spectrum that I see entropy playing in my reality.
So when I apply this to music I am witnessing the expression of intention through vibration, it is in fact the language of the human soul. Which is why it has been used for spiritual and ceremonial purposes for all of human history. There is in fact a much deeper process that is happening here, that allows music to bridge the physical and non-physical. I think your crystal analogy is closer to the truth. I transmit my intention through vibration, which informs and entrains your system on how it should be (bypassing the mind). This lowers the disordered entropic state of consciousness, creating coherence and resonance. Which in turn connects us to spirit and to each other.
Benn your music has manifested such a major part of my life and I was hoping you see what I'm writing. Thanks for everything you've done for music and life itself. Your impact can't be understated.
I can imagine that holding a note for a long time will entropy. Your voice will start to crack & lose volume or breathe, the longer u hold it. Or play it on an instrument.
There's an Example of entropy in music. Or the more times u play a record, (or CD, I guess), the more used up & scratched, or whatever, (I dunno much about records, lol), and falls apart, & doesn't sound as clear
Brilliant reflection, thanks for sharing Benn
This channel is quickly becoming one of my favorite channels. You do _really good_ science communication.
I love that you touched on how the concept of entropy is approached and then avoided in geological self-organizing processes like the formation of banding in agate development (without specifically mentioning self-organization in agate crystal formation).
Entropy is a creation of our mind. It depends on what we perceive as “special”. It is a byproduct of consciousness.
Just wonderful Benn, just wonderful. ❤
I am midway thro your vid and looked up entropy. I previously thought it had a tight definition, but that’s only in the context of quantifying the thing in thermodynamics. Once you branch away from this, it’s about the ‘disorderliness’ of ‘stuff’. That everything tends to slowly decay into chaos. So, it’s easy to say that lashings of reverb and then playing many more notes than are musical, clearly leads to that discordant mess we’ve all had when just messing about with an instrument and reverb or delay/echo effects. In fact, there are songs I’ve heard where the outro is in effect, a cacophony or absolute dog’s dinner of sound.
The descent into this, is well-recognised as a way of wrapping up a big rock number, that last-chord thrashing while the drummer goes nuts behind and the bassist hammers the ‘hawsers’ to make an absolute climactic racket. Usually there’s then a sudden ‘twang’ of the lead guitar and all goes silent followed by hopefully rapturous applause?! But, as soon as we move off a specific instance of entropy like that, I’m lost, so hey, I might as well watch the rest of your musing Benn. Take care all - 2024 has all the hallmarks of being as entropic as sh!t.
Great description!
That "CS definition" is actually the physics definition on the most fundamental level. If you're building a heat pump or doing something else applied, you'll use the definition that's concerned with the spread of energy, but that definition reduces at a fundamental level to the "CS" one that describes probability distributions.
here we go! scrolled through to find someone saying this. yup. for those following along at home, for a quick intro read ch2 of Elements of Information Theory, it's not too bad and it's on your favorite textbook website
Hey Ben, I’d like to give my thoughts on defining music entropy, as a student studying both physics and classical Horn Performance in college. Going off the classic “microstates per macrostate” definition, you could define the macrostate as the action of performing a particular piece, in general. Then you define the microstates as individual instances of you performing that same piece. You could measure the entropy, by taking many samples of you playing that piece, (one macrostate) and measure the variance among your performances (all individual microstates). While you can’t count every possible microstate, like one would in thermodynamics, you might be able to compare the audio files and analyze how similar or different they are from one another. High variety in performance would correspond to low entropy, and low skill. Thus, low variance in performances would be low entropy, and signify a master who’s able to consistently execute something well.
❤ It's a mark of your wide ranging interest that you came to having a discussion with yourself about entropy and music. I follow several channels concerned with such phenomena, including Veritasium. It would never occur to me to exercise my mind in linking concepts in music and the concept of entropy.
I hope your summing up at the end of the video where you conceded a general acceptance of the complexity of the question you asked and the broader need to let go and relax in order that music can flow.
We put energy into making music we put energy into systems capable of producing and of reproducing music. Music comes out and goes away. We have to put more energy in to get more music out of the same system or a adifferent system. Our auditory systems use energy to translate received sound waves for our brains to process. We might input energy to draw the attention of others or to try to stop the music. The emotional aspects of the music process all require energy input in order to express those emotions. When we no longer have energy to input, our making and appreciation of music winds down to nothing, just like the old grammophone.
This becomes a spiritual question. How did humans come into being in the first place? It was not through entropy. There is a creative organizing spiritual force in the universe that creates and increases complexity against the grain of physical entropic laws. I'm not religious, but in that way we are indeed made in God's image. We are, as with all biological beings, an inexplicable outgrowth of creation and the primary driving force of existence as a whole. It's Yin and Yang. Chaos and Order. Music and art is a creative endeavor as creation is "god's" creative endeavor. It's why when we create, we feel closer to that essence force and peace. It's flow state. We are in closer alignment with something beyond what we can measure in physical terms.
Awesome video. I really enjoy your enthusiasm, and your humor and your dedication to explaining things in the best way possible so as to make them more ingestible for the masses is inspiring and appreciated. Thank you for your efforts and your contributions.
This video gives voice to a question I've had for a long time, and the question has flavored everything I do for a few years now. This might be leaning into pseudoscience/metaphysics/philosophy, but I've always conceptualized entropy as the universe's propensity (I think of it a desire/intention) to "learn" to fulfill more states, to discover more ways of being. In a phrase, "entropy is the universe's desire to make as many things happen as possible." So when things like crystals, music, systems, all pop up in what is popularly thought of to be a chaotic universe, the crystallization of a structure allows for more rapid discovery of new states, or in other words, the universe is learning to fulfill more states, and is getting better at it. I've always wondered if that learning is a facet of entropy, if not fundamentally what entropy is.
Again, this is pretty esoteric, but I don't believe in coincidences. Maybe that's my pattern recognizing brain trying to shoehorn meaning where there is none, but I'd feel remiss to not share.
Love you man. Always on the search for just the right kind of complexity ...
Really well made and thought provoking video! I really enjoy that you actually seem to have a solid understanding of entropy :D
The way you approach science is so inspiring. You are a blessing Benn 🙌
I would definitely hang out with you, the next round is on me. What I think about entropy in music is the fact that a set gets better and better with time, at the end of the concert it gets wild. On another scale and I felt it when you were talking in the woods, at 15:15 in this unscripted but amazingly editied video, music has to be richer than the previous one, with more notes, more chords, more ideas. Music is life.
I was actually thinking about similar links with entropy and day to day life like a month ago. This is fantastic.
I love these in-depth topics like this. The Science + music thing is a creative way of thinking, just as playing or writing music itself. Great stuff!
I think music entropy is when all of the noises and permutations and configurations of noises have been played and heard and there is no longer any truly new music
Music entropy could explain why I play abstract drone music but started out playing shred guitar. Yeah, that sounds better than I'm just lazy.
Two days later and my second attempt at watching this
8:27 🤯 The moment you got me all of a sudden super interested in the topic 🤯
Whoa that’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand. I got enough time and brain space for work, family and listening to, and playing music. I wish you all the best in figuring out the science behind it all.
Wow. Never really put much thougt into this. It gives us an idea for our next album. Thank you for this video
Great question. I hope the answer is yes. That's why I started building my synth.
I'm not talented at all, but one day I want to finish a good song. Until then I try to defy entropy by sharing my eurorack modules.
It feels like music or the capacity to make it wouldn’t occur (statistically impossible) unless it increased entropy overall.
I think that music helps humans coordinate, cooperate, and socially learn better. But this helps us extract extremely energy dense resources, or deal with the consequences of an extremely energy intensive society.
The amount of energy it takes to produce a song on an electric guitar, edit it, publish it, stream it, remix it is orders of magnitude more than the energy required to sing a song, or play a flute.
Even if music is highly ordered like a crystal, it’s ultimately just going to increase entropy or aid humans in radiating heat more efficiently.
it's all about the relative amount of entropy increase. adding silence adds 0 entropy. adding white noise adds the maximum addable entropy at a given signal level. adding music adds a signal that is middling between those extremes. a reasonable approximation of entropy of a sound file is how big the compressed version of it is (and this is not a coincidence, read Elements of Information Theory ch2 and ch5 to properly understand why this is the case, it's on whatever your favorite textbook website is)
oh also, if you want to do the entropy of a score, try running the midi file through brotli or zstd (or just gzip or zip). any of those compressors will give you a relative estimate of the number of bits of entropy needed to encode the file. then you can compare it to another score. your favorite scores probably have middling entropy.
Always appreciate your vids. Thanks for the mental wake up this morning. Now I’m gonna go take a walk and read a book about Bill Frisell.
Damn. About the feeling to a song... Haven't heard it said better than that.
Keep on doing what you're doing man.
Dear Benn I wish I could hang out with you!!! Thx for everything (:
One Love!
Always forward, never ever backward!!
☀️☀️☀️
💚💛❤️
🙏🏿🙏🙏🏼
If u can't find meaning in a song you like then stop. Stop doing whatever you are doing and sit down put on some good headphones, maybe use some nice speakers and... just listen to it.
I have found myself feeling everything I liked on a song time and time again by making it the central atraction and not a distraction to a boring task. Also close your eyes while you hear it. It helps a lot to focus
as a physics graduate student pursuing a master thesis, this was really cool!
Entropy really is a fascinating concept
I love that both you and Cameron worked "superposition" into your new videos. What are the odds? Well, seeing as the probability collapsed to a certainty, I guess it's 100%.
what a coincidence! I'm just reading The Information by James Gleick which has got some really interesting information on entropy in physics, in information theory etc. Nice to hear your musings on this in a totally different context!
I was reading “Work” by James Suzman and it was also very relevant. I’ll check the book out!
16:03 I have adhd but I was glued to the screen. great job sir! bravo 🙌🏼
16:08 This in particular made me laugh the most because I had paused and skipped back in the video at least 20 times due to being distracted by something else, but wanting to go back and properly listen to what you were saying because it was interesting. Great video.
I'd say a quick way to relate entropy to a common music producer problem is Writer's Block.
That feeling of getting stuck, spinning the wheels of a composition with the ever growing feeling that you won't be able to get it back to an enjoyable state.
And the crystal analogy is what tied this all together. If you think back to how musical ideas are discovered or created, you put yourself at a huge advantage of breeding new seeds to sow. Creating that momentum that you may have lost on a stale project.
A great anlogy!
Bela Bartok (also regarded as the father of ethnomusicology) in his research about folkloric roots in music (spoiler warning) arrived at a standstill. in a pretty reductive way it's really hard to pinpoint the origin of something, so in a way we are just spectators on how chaos turns into order, and viceversa. Let alone if you add variables like perception, memory, their coding/decoding and the reconstruction of all that chaotic data. Without memory there's no music, and for you dear reader, the memory will fade someday.
Very nice essay. You pointed to the key for understanding how we humans wrap our minds around the absolute which we can't know: using metaphors. We can't escape it. Just refine (e.g. science) our metaphors. Which is also entropic :)
I'm no physycist, nor mathematician and You may be on drugs, but totaly right about the music helping us out😉
BTW I really do enjoy talking about entropy as well with engineers, other musicians, family or even with complete strangers.
This made my day, tysm for ranting at a camera 🙏✨
Hi, I give a lot of consideration to entropy myself, and used to play around with the notion in a philosophical way. Interesting take about entropy of music. I would suggest a categorisation: entropy of music in general, then entropy of a song is an abstratct and because is not a phisical object until plaid it normaly does not experience entropy, as long as infomation is preserved. Any effect of the song like emotion in listener is a second system, and everytime is listened adds something new. In this regard effect has negative entropy but as the law sais for negative entropy we put energy in(playing, listneing, interpreting or integrating the song. To add on entropy, i am also looking at it from a perspective of purpose of the universe, and in thia entropy law lays a big clue about it all, and it's not the distruction of everything if left alone but more like the necessity to do something about it. Is more like the shark built to swim in order to stay alive. Thanks for the videos I enjoy them very much. cheers.
I always think of Entropy, in very general terms, as moving from a state of High to Low Potential. For me that is the easiest way to conceptualise it for the majority of situations to which the term might apply.
I don't know how accurate it is tho, as a layman. But be it thermal dynamics,, chemistry, psychology or even crystals it seems to work.
As often as I wonder if that spark of emotion is felt by most everyone via music, I find just talking about it or hearing others talk about it comes so close to a similar feeling; true understanding through a language. Music just seems unique in the fact that you don't need to be able to speak the language to understand it, but I guess you could also relate that to spoken language in the fact that you can understand the language but may not be able to read it? Music is just so special, and almost everyone coasts through life without realizing it's real significance.
Very interesting hypotheses. I like how your brain works.
In my younger days, I was capable of entertaining new theories of speculations I had created by combining knowledge from different disciplines, from broad areas of interest, commingling specific knowns from different fields into something new. Creatives do this as a natural function of their being. Their openness & interest in new information & how that information may be applied is a natural byproduct of their curious minds. Since it may be apparent that even as I've gained new knowledge, this capacity for creative theorizing across disciplines has waned, that that itself may be an example of Entropy.
Seems like you might get more paydirt digging in Hegelian Metaphysics- specifically in his understanding of the dialectic applied to history. Thank you for your videos. I like them
Very interesting video. I had some thoughts about it while watching. I think that everything is entropic but that sometimes nature has mechanisms that try to organize things with all of this new entropic material around. It seems like that is what humanity's role in entropy is. Or any intelligent species for that matter. To organize disorder and to find patterns.
Hi Benn! Love these ramblings, keep ‘m coming😊
I'm really enjoying your channel. I love all the instruments you have. I think a Chapman Stick would be a nice addition ;)
I've got ADHD, and not only did I not lose interest at any point during this video, nor did I get cured from it! This is pure dopamine to me!!
It’s 2024 and I’m starting my day by watching a video on musical entropy. Not sure why but I’m here for it! 💪🏽 Eccentric Scientist Benn > Gear Reviewer Benn. 🙌🏽
I can add some perspective to this subject I believe. My educational background is in Computer Science. But I had several experiences in my life that took me on a deep dive into Abnormal Psychology, and a disorder known as DID. There, I learned something about the nature of the mind that truly challenged my ability to absorb and understand these experiences. Now that I am more comfortable with my understanding, and I've come to a place where it all really makes a lot of sense, it's equally challenging to approach the concept of fully explaining all of this to another person. I think the simple way to summarize my conclusion is this... we are a 'system' made up of 'parts'. When we look at the physical body, that much is obvious. But when you examine how the mind works, and how our personality is formed, you begin to appreciate we ourselves are not as 'singular' as we might seem. Much like a computer might have a singular processor, but multiple cores doing the work internally. An easy way to convey the intuition of how our mind & personality is structured, might be an orange. An orange appears to the outside world to be a singular structure. But if you peel it, you see that it exists in sections held together by membrane. Our personality is made up of parts that are fractal in nature. More complex parts, made of parts, made of parts, that become less complex in themselves the deeper you go. It mirrors the same sort of pattern of generational evolution we see in computer programming languages. Layers of various generations of languages that allow us to communicate with computers.... binary machine code, assembly, block structured, domain specific, and then high level languages such as C++. Our mind, and our personality exists in layers of parts that have their own unique perspective and experience based memories, through which our current experiences are filtered and funneled to a singular conclusion. When things seem more chaotic, it's because the nuances are more fully absorbed and saturated in the mind, the variations are fully realized, and at some point our mind works these details and nuances through our collective 'multiplicity' of parts, to the point where we have a more rounded and singular consensus of how we should perceive the experience. Another simple way to say this is that nature is chaotic, but our minds work to make sense of it, thereby allowing us to perceive order in more natural chaos. Science teaches us that we each individually experience our own version of 'reality'. We might both hear & see the same bird singing a song, but due to variations in distances, and corresponding differences in the time it takes the sound & light waves carrying that data to our senses, we ultimately do not experience the exact same reality. Given that's the case, 'reality' is therefore always based on perspective of past events. We can never actually see something in the current moment of time, thus we are technically always see stuff as it occurred in the past, and basing our perceptions / reality on our own unique 'history'.
Your comments around the 15 minute mark reminded me of This Is Your Brain On Music, which was fun to read while on drugs.
Entropy is half of the dance of Kali. Creation & Destruction in our shared experience.
Not the term is going to last through the period when we get a deeper understanding of whatever it’ll be called in the future, but you’re doing that because you’re neurodivergent. You’re whole intro and the ensuing delve is 100% relatable.
In thermodynamics, enthalpy, is the sum of a thermodynamic system's internal energy and the product of its pressure and volume. It is a state function used in many measurements in chemical, biological, and physical systems at a constant pressure, which is conveniently provided by the large ambient atmosphere.
I think this may be something we need to consider.
1:37 The disappointment in Cameron's face made me burst out laughing! Peak acting! 😀
Something that helps with understanding entropy is a simpler definition of it: it's measurement of the rate of change. Words like "orderly" and "disorderly" are too subjective and relative to the state of something else, so they just end up making the idea more confusing than it ought to be. Something with High Entropy is changing its state very rapidly in a given time unit, while Low Entropy is a steady unchanging state. Things usually just move from one steady state to another when something inacts on them, so often when charting entropy you get bell curves as the entropy increases (there's a lot of changes going on) and then decreases again as the new steady state is reached (the changes have basically stopped).
I really needed this, thank you
The last thing you said about music being an attempt at ordering chaos (paraphrasing you here) made me think of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. This is from the wiki page about the book:
Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally based self esteem, which Becker calls "heroism": a "defiant creation of meaning" expressing "the myth of the significance of human life" as compared to other animals. This counters the personal insignificance and finitude that death represents in the human mind.
Brilliant. Entertaining and thoughtful. More please.
i love this video so much. thank you ♾️
I agree with your final points about music, but I think there is an additional perspective. I see how music and crystals relate to each other in this context, but I think that music is also a reflection of our minds. Minds "defy" entropy in much the same way that music, and crystals do.
PS: I'm 52, and I've been playing guitar since I was 16. When I first started, learning seemed agonisingly slow, then it sped up for a while around the age of 18, then slowed for a few years, sped up again roundabout the age of 22, then slowed again, then faster in my early to mid 30s, afterwards slowing down until I hit 40,...and then I went through a few years where a whole bunch of stuff that I could never play properly before, suddenly all fell into place, and I'd have to say that was the fastest, biggest learning patch of my guitar playing life.
The rate has slowed again from about 2016, mostly because other things in life got in the way, but in 2021 I started writing more and better songs than I have ever written before, and much of it in genres that I have never written in before.
Just thought I'd share.
One of the most interesting vids, I saw on your channel
👏👏👏👏👏
I often struggle with the feeling that I don't want to listen to my favorite songs too often for fear of "wearing out" the song and how I perceive and enjoy it. Maybe that "wearing out" of a song in my brain is musical entropy?
My new lifegoal is to wander in the woods with Benn, talking about the meaning of music, entropy and fractals. \o/
Can I come along? I'll bring mushrooms.
Create a 64 step sequence that starts with a cromatic scale. Apply a 50% probablility that each note will move a half step up or down on each loop. Eventually the pattern will appear completely random. It's possible it could eventually produce the cromatic scale again, but the odds are extremently low.
I think about entropy (and by extension time, gravity) a lot too, perhaps it is the ultimate indirect purpose of all life or things in the universe, to act as the agents of chaos and bring about the eventual heat death of the universe by utlizing all workable energy.
I've wondered how to explore it musically but not been able to express it properly yet.
PS - Benn, I don't know if I will ever get the chance to hang out with you. That being said, I consider you one of the most real and interesting people I have never physically met.
Never thought about this in this way, thanks
I don’t know if it’s accurate but the way entropy made most sense to me was that theres a lot more ways for a room to be messy than there is for it to be clean
The basic question of "how would we measure that?" is quite strange in the context of music. One interpretation could be, does music get more chaotic (follows less musical rules?) or do we invent new rules to follow that include new ways of making music? how do we quantify this or can we even? Should we just look at music that is popular or gets voted as popular or everything that people create? The way people learn to make music did change a lot and the rules they are using are different from past generations. overall lots of things to think about.
As PhD Chemist I love this video 😂 - Benn, we should once meet in real life. Pretty often I think that we are both pretty broadly interested people - I began with drawing painting and science and started making music much later.
I DID make it to the end and found this a fascinating, if somewhat esoteric, line of questioning.
The drop of colouring in the water gave me an idea to consider what the line of entropy might be.
The nexus of a song (or any creative idea in the mind of the artist...let's call it a spark) is that drop of colour just as it forms before meeting into the water.
The entropy starts (drop meets water)at the point where the artist formulates a mechanism to attempt to express that initial spark into the physical world to allow sharing.( Lets face it, squeezing strings against wood is a fairly poor way to express an idea or emotion but we make the best of it.)
Drop meets water.
Entropy continues as the initial spark is diluted by the physical limitations used to express the spark to others and continues to dilute as other people interact with the "art" and may or may not feel what the initial spark was.
The spark spreads out in the "water" and while maintaining it's initial "colour" is "diluted" by the individual responses to engaging with the art.
Each interaction is it's own micro state.
And so on...
Like I said...esoteric.
Perhaps I'm the one on drugs! (LOL)
I always thought of entopy as the inverse of order/energy concentration. Take the example of food. When youre in your room with a burger (assume your room is a closed system) your room has some ammount of total order and energy. Some areas of your room have higher concentrations of order and energy like your phone or the burger. When you eat the buger you have systems inside of yourself that convert the burger into other usefull types of energy. Say after eating the burger you decide to clean you room, in doing so you increase the order of your room and decrease the entropy of your room so it looks like the order in your room has increased HOWEVER the work you did used energy that had to come from somewhere. You used the highly concentraded energy source of the burger, you broke it down and used its energy to drive your muscles in moving yourself and the mess in your room arround. So the concenctrated energy of the burger has been distributed by you arround your room. You diffused the concentration of energy in the burger.
Particularly about the impressions and descriptions of music, but in general about the whole video, take a look, if you dare, into the phenomenology of Charles S. Peirce. Papers on Peircean semiotics and music would be a nice entry point. I think you'll enjoy it. 💌
I enjoy a good ramble, thank you. I wonder if the form of highest entropy audio is white noise and the lowest entropy is a single frequency sine wave. It seems, from our ears to our experience, via our brain, audio is likely fragmented and recombined into meaning. Every time I get tinnitus, I wonder how much meaning I'm losing.
I loved this - especially the ending 🫶
The section titles tending towards chaos was a nice touch.
Just to be a geek, I'm a fan of Kittel&Kroemer's Thermal Physics, myself. On pg.40 (2nd edition), they give a hard definition of entropy as the logarithm of the multiplicity of states. ("Rehandling" the Boltzmann factor in other places so that entropy is simply the logarithm of a big number, the big number being the number of quantum states the system could find itself in.) I like this approach because it helps demystify the thinking around what entropy IS (count all the states, take the log, that's the entropy). Why it's relevant / why we bother to give this number a name, that then becomes a reason to dig in to other statements like the first law (the relationship between entropy, temperature, and energy, among others) and the second law (a consistently observed physical phenomenon of the evolution of certain types of physical systems). I mean, whether entropy is disorder or not, or is a measure of it or not, it's a little toemato-tomatoe. Overall, I think nature is an incredible guide that helped give credibility to the physicist's use of numbers, and, in the case of entropy, that likely in turn helped show others how they could deal with analogous concepts analytically. (Though, I'm no historian of science. I suppose I just like to think that physics "the natural philosophy^tm" was first here, hehe.)
That was fun and very interesting. Thank you!