While it may be impossible to determine precisely what defines appealing and interesting music, it can be argued that, in order to have these qualities, sounds should contain enough elements of order and disorder, coherence and decoherence, or structure and variation throughout a musical piece. These can appear in different ways and at various levels; in the interplay between expected and surprising note sequences found in engaging melodies, in the superposition of perfectly and imperfectly coinciding harmonics required for a rich chord, or in the mixture of regular and syncopated rhythms that build a driving percussion layer, to name a few. Another important component is the inclusion of multiple elements that can both combine into a coherent musical structure or disband into independently acting parts. Music is often based entirely on fragile harmonic or rhythmic structures that fluctuate between states of order and disorder, constantly consolidating and collapsing. Composers explicitly explore these extremes, for example, in the interplay between instruments in an orchestra, between melodic lines in counterpoint [1], between collective and solo parts in a Jazz performance [2], or in the dense chromatic melodies of some contemporary music [3].
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