Humans love recognizable patterns and symmetry. Rhymes sound alike, and when coupled with meter, help make the words "stick" in our memory. We also like artificial things that are easily distinguishable from the chaos and entropy of the natural world. We enjoy our feeble attempts at imposing order.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
65 points (98.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35780 readers
1011 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Well said. It seems to all be about satisfying our expectations.
Or when expectations are subverted but then satisfied in a different way (jokes, puns, etc).
But basically confirmation of our pattern matching being right.
1,2,3,4… I will now say more.
5,6,7,8… I will not hesitate.
Satisfying
1,2,3,4… I will now say more.
5,6,7,8… I will not delay.
Frustrating
It’s as if the human mind was built to recognize patterns. There’s probably some biochemical reward mechanism associated with finding perceived patterns and structures, which would explain why that feels pleasant.
I'd say a lot in music is about structure, patterns, repetition etc. And endings of words being similar is part of that.
I have two theories, applying not just to rhyme but to traditional verse forms in general (i.e., formal constraints like rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.):
-
In prehistory—when all knowledge was transmitted orally—verse constraints acted as a sort of verbal checksum to prevent transmitted knowledge from getting corrupted accidentally. And the presence of verse patterns became a subliminal flag indicating that whatever was being sung or recited was important knowledge worth the extra effort of casting into verse.
-
It’s been found in many different contexts that humans are most drawn to information with a novelty-to-predictability ratio of about 20–25%: if it’s much less than that we get bored, and if it’s much more than that we get lost and/or dismiss it as gibberish. So adding a predictable element like a regular rhyme pattern gives the creator freedom to add more novel elements without losing the audience.
It's also worth pointing out that rhyming is not the only way to get those pattern-recognition neurons firing. Meter in poetry/lyrics is all about this, and the Ancient Greeks knew all about it. They also knew all about mnemonic tropes (wine-dark sea) and other devices. Old English in particular built most of its poetry and songs around alliteration rather than rhyming.
Because it's drugs for your brain. Your brain expects to find a pattern and rewards you when you do. Brainscans have shown similar activation patterns in people that are listening to their favorite music as people who have recently injected heroin.
this sounds made up but i currently do not care enough to look into it so i shall take you at your word
i hope you have not misinformed me but if you have i shall do nothing except continue to nap
It's all neuron activation. Always has been.
I want to add to the question with: and why does sometimes rhymes or phrases in other languages sound even more pleasing? "Sometimes friends" in Japanese is just super fun. Tokidoki tomodachi!
Pattern seeking brain
I like the novelty/predictability ratio idea. There is also the idea of “create expectations and satisfy them”, which leads to a sense of stability. Our cultures and genres create expectations. Rhymes tied to a certain metric can become part of these expectations. Of course, you can also create expectations and frustrate them, which leads to a sense of instability. Searching for “fakeout rhyme” videos makes this evident. Pat Pattison, an expert in songwriting, could be a good source on this ☺️
Rhythm