One of my favorite short stories is "The Ultimate Melody" by Arthur C. Clarke, which can be found in Tales of the White Hart, if you go looking for it - which I highly recommend.
The premise is simple: There are some songs which stick in your mind, so insidiously and completely that you find yourself humming them for weeks, or even months. I myself have been known to sing Greensleeves or Girl in the shower, over and over again, because something about the songs sticks in my head in such a way that I can't get them out.
What is frightening about this, though, is that the song will, for a time, drive from your head all thoughts other than the song - it will make concentration impossible, it will leave you unable to carry on conversations or do work without being distracted. We've all experienced this, of course - when a song gets stuck so thoroughly in your head that it's all you can think of.
So why does this happen? Well, the premise espoused in the story is that the music we find compelling is just a reflection of the Ultimate Melody, a song which resonates perfectly with the human brain. Weird, maybe, but an interesting idea - and one that starts to seem more possible when you think about how songs break out, catch people's minds seemingly simultaneously and completely, and then die away again.
So what would happen if we could synthesize such a thing? All it would take is a computer running through lists of possible sounds, selecting for the combinations and melodies which humanity finds most catchy - and, given some time, the ultimate melody is within your grasp.
But of course, as ever, when reaching for the very top, mankind's hubris turns on us, and the scientist who creates the melody becomes an empty shell, his mind totally taken over by the strands and chords of the song to end all songs. After all, even a simple toon or ditty can erase thought from one's mind - the ultimate melody must have power vastly beyond such a thing.
But my question is - what would that be like? To hear the ultimate melody, and never to turn back; to give your mind over to the music of the heavens? It wouldn't be like death, exactly. More like transcendance.
And the answer? Yep. It would be worth it. I would do that.
Moving (New Blog)
13 years ago
2 comments:
I think that building machines to randomly bash together words and pictures and sounds and maybe smells? Should be somewhere on the priority list for humans. There's a short story about this, but only for a library with infinite random books. Random songs would be equally cool. For that matter, what about random lyrics for songs that already exist? Maybe all those songs you know and love sound better with DIFFERENT WORDS IN THEM. How weird would that be?
Sure, most of the output of randomizing machines would be garbage, but maybe you'd get lucky one day and it would write a beautiful sonata, or an epic poem for our age, or a set of Star Wars prequels that don't suck harder than the vacuum of space...
...maybe it would write the world's funniest joke and the world would die laughing?
Ah, the ear worm, goader of creativity.
The world of music composed by real-life humans is replete with attempts to capture that very music of the spheres . . . would there cease to be a reason to continue the effort once the computer had spoken?
Loud's extension of the argument supports the potential generation of "Hamlet" by the team of typewriting monkeys. Would it matter if it were produced intentionally via programming? Accident vs. art?
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