This Post Is About Prosody (vs. Procrastination in the name of Pattern Extraction)
No, really. My exceptional book club is discussing " The Soap Opera Effect ." In case you don't want to read the article (which I didn't but I did read it) it's a setting in Smart TVs which inserts AI-generated frames to smooth out motion in fast-moving scenes. Motion-smoothing was invented because some people found action unnerving when it didn't match expectations. This is why we care about prosody , right? Right. Tina Ross taught me the word, but Bill Goodell has been teaching me to be mindful of prosody in songwriting without using the word (like making horse sounds , for example.) We are delighted when the feel of the music matches the sentiment of the lyrics. We like surprises, but we insist on being able to understand (or believe we do) how the author arrived at that decision in the plot. We love our feelings validated, and we especially love our own Aha! moment. This is how songs (movies, books, art) feel familiar to us and create comfort. Proso