It has been said that the human mind is the ultimate pattern seeker. It’s also been discovered that people under stress find patterns in the chaotic distributions of dots on an old TV tuned to a blank channel! Suddenly finding a pattern in music is an exciting insight, holding promise for even deeper insight to come, but it might best be considered a beginning of realization and not the end.
Andrew Grenville, in his article “The Pattern-Seeking Brain and its Implications for Insights Professionals”, discusses how “We intuitively concoct stories to explain the ‘patterns’ we see—even when the connections are random and spurious” and the implications for those who seek to discover insights through their work. This sets me to thinking of the many ways the brain might notice patterns we are not fully aware of in music, as we pay our conscious attention to melody, harmony, and so forth. But I think more importantly, it serves as a reminder of the need for humility in those of us who consider ourselves to be expert at something. Is it humility that will ultimately distinguish us from AI, which seems to foist upon us its first concoction of an answer?
About the other things in music: the growing loudness, the waves of timbral shifting that constitute orchestration, the myriad other details: all are being detected by the brain, you can bet your sweet bippy! And the thing about insight, as I process the concept, is that pattern recognition goes on behind the conscious mind, and turns up realizations at seemingly random times. Sitting meditation, or any kind of contemplative practice, fosters the kind of mental calm that seems to encourage the falling together of insight.
One of the most important uses of this kind of pattern recognition in my work has come from my compositional practice. Years ago, when I was just beginning to meditate and do yoga, I developed a habit for composing that I’ll tell you about now, and that I often encourage my students to practice as well.
In daily composing, I often have good continuity, as the music lives on from day to day in my mind, meaning it’s easy to get started on a given day. But inevitably, it turns out now and then that I’m not really sure of the direction I’m taking. Maybe I’m starting a new section, something like that. So I look over my notes, all the things I’ve been planning to do, to use, all the stuff I’ve already composed, just cram my head full of all that I can’t decide about. Then I lie down, and just let what happens happen. If I fall asleep, I figure I needed that. But most often, as I allow myself to drift toward sleep, the conscious thoughts start kind of floating around, and they rather collide, forming new associations. When a striking thing happens, I feel compelled to get up and jot down the idea. And whether or not it’s exactly where I was stuck, the insight that drew me to the drafting table has gotten me over that little resistant edge that keeps me from getting started, and I’m off on another day.
It seems to me the same kind of mental construction, or fabrication, of patterns from what we hear is a beginning point for our understanding more deeply the music we hear. I say beginning point because it is incumbent upon us to reflect on such constructions regarding music, often so quickly appearing in our brains, to test them with further listening. Sometimes my insights will be right on target, revealing important truths about the music, while often I have to admit that my quickly pulling these things together as evidence of some kind of pattern turns out not to hold up. The intuitions may still lead to accurate insight with further exploration, so of course they have value one way or the other, as long as we balance the outpouring of insight with a dose of self-scrutiny.
A little—no, a steady dose—of humility is necessary, if we ever hope to find truth. The more sure we are of our knowledge, the more humility is required to counterbalance our arrogance. It can be difficult to find the humility necessary to accept someone else’s contribution to our thought world, especially from a colleague or competitor, possibly even from someone completely outside our field, but learning to do so can produce not only better results, but a more calm existence for oneself.