OK, I'll throw out my suggestions for finding spiritual music. First, consider this excerpt from a book on AI:
(p. 85)
Music, Endorphins,
and the Idealist
Philosophers
FOR MOST OF US the boundary between "in-
side" and "outside" seems clearcut. Outside
is a world of objects, nature, other creatures;
inside is a private kingdom of thoughts,
dreams, desires, and memories, enclosed in
the hard casement of the skull. When someone confuses the two, mistaking
his own thoughts for the orders of KGB agents, we label him as schizophrenic.
If we look deep into the perverse complexity of the nervous system, how-
ever, we learn that internal and external realities aren't so easy to distin-
guish.
In 1977 Avram Goldstein posed an odd question to a motley group of
Stanford medical and music students and employees at his Hormone Re-
search Laboratory. Did they ever, when moved by their favorite music,
experience thrills or tingles, a prickly feeling at the back of the neck or
along the spine? Some said, yes, music did affect them that way. Where-
upon Goldstein picked ten volunteers and put them in darkened, sound-
proof booths with headphones.
Each time the wistful strains of Mahler or
the shrieking wah-wah guitar solos of Jimi Hendrix (or
whatever the sub-
ject's favorite musical passage was) sent shivers down their spines, the
subjects indicated so with hand signals. Between sessions Goldstein gave
them shots of either saline (a placebo) or the endorphin-blocker naloxone.
It was a double-blind study; neither the subjects nor the experimenters
knew who got what. After nineteen separate tests, the pharmacologist
reported that a third of the listeners experienced fewer and less intense
thrills after naloxone. The implication:
The sublime tingles of musical
appreciation had something to do with endorphins.Hooper, Judith, and Dick Teresi. 1986.
The Three-Pound Universe. New York, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company.
So that's part of what you're looking for: endorphins. However, endorphins are usually associated with euphoria, which is an emotion that does not necessarily have a spiritual connection. (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorphins) However, another clue comes from another AI book...
(p. 152)
Neuroscientists from the University of California at San Diego have found what
they call
the God module, a tiny locus of nerve cells in the frontal lobe that ap-
pears to be activated during religious experiences. They discovered this neural
machinery while studying epileptic patients who have intense mystical experi-
ences during seizures. Apparently the intense neural storms during a seizure
stimulate the God module.
Tracking surface electrical activity in the brain with
highly sensitive skin monitors, the scientists found a similar response when very
religious nonepileptic persons were shown words and symbols evoking their
spiritual beliefs.Kurzweil, Ray. 1999.
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York, New York: Viking Penguin.
Now it's a little harder to debunk the notion of spiritual feelings. Such feelings may have only a physical basis--"only" a cluster of neurons--but their practical effect is sublime and the result can be some of the loftiest thinking and goals possible in human beings. That excerpt also tells us exactly what to look for, regarding response to music that produces spiritual feelings. Now the path to the automatic production of spiritual music gets clearer: have human subjects listen to music that generates endorphins and/or that stimulates the God module, probably with emphasis on the latter, and monitor and note which music produces the strongest reaction of those two effects. (The proper mixture of those two sensations would be an interesting question.)
One more suggestion: Don't use averages, but rather invariants. An average is a value that is roughly in the middle, and when seeking extremes (in this case, "best"), the average is the wrong value to seek. I'd recommend using a set of invariants, which would be the mathematical operation of set intersection applied to a set of values (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersection_(set_theory)). In this case, the set of values would be the attributes of the musical passages that create spiritual feelings. For example, if three songs created spiritual feelings and their attributes were....
song #1: S1 = {vocal harmonies of 3 or more parts, exotic scales, instruments with high sustain, same key}
song #2: S2 = {vocal harmonies of 3 or more parts, common scales, instruments with high sustain, multiple keys}
song #3: S3 = {vocal harmonies of 3 or more parts, common scales, instruments with high sustain, same key}
Then...
S1 intersect S2 intersect S3 = {vocal harmonies of 3 or more parts, instruments with high sustain}
...which would give you a set of two attributes that are present in *every* song that the human subjects considered spiritual. That would at the least be a set of major clues that would start to zero in on the attributes most likely to be important.
That's a simplified example, of course, but it does bring up another suggestion: instead of initially drowning in the complexities of melodies and chords and how to describe their shapes and overlapping regions, start the investigation with middle level concepts such as the attributes I used above, along with some of the attributes I mentioned in my earlier post of this thread, such as song structure, key modality, and instruments present. For example, I know I have a preference for major keys (as opposed to minor keys), and a preference for two-part verses (as opposed to one-part verses), and a preference for songs with a structure like ABABC where the C section is a lengthy climax, so the music generation software, if any is used, should have options at that level of abstraction, which AIVA did not (my earlier complaint).
For a concrete example, recently I've found the first song of the following song pair to be very spiritually uplifting and endophin-generating, too, at least for myself:
()
Eric Johnson - Venus Isle & The Battle We Have Won
Flatuleitor AndShit
Published on Oct 17, 2011