François CholletVerified account

Posit: if you can understand why abstract sound patterns in minor key sound "sad" (and "happy" for major key), you are 17% of the way to understanding how abstraction works -- and 17% would be earth-shattering progress

And by the way, this is not cultural conditioning, nor is it caused by the acoustics of emotional speech

Ofc the minor/major key example is just one specific instance of a more general phenomenon. What's interesting is the general case: abstract sound patterns can evoke emotions (or thoughts) in a way that is not associative. This non-associativeness is the essence of abstraction.

In visual terms: a musical pattern evokes an emotion/thought not because you've heard it before and were conditioned to associate it with the emotion (that would be pattern recognition, not abstraction), but because you process it as having the same *shape* as the emotion/thought

The notion of the shape of a thought or emotion, and the existence of classes of such shapes (thought topology, rather than thought geometry) is the essence of abstraction.