In his April, 1978 Mathematical Recreations column of Scientific American, Martin Gardner expresses the importance of novelty and familiarity, the two opposing aspects of aesthetic appeal, in this way:
"It is commonplace in musical criticism to say that we enjoy good music because it offers a mixture of order and surprise. How could it be otherwise? Surprise would not be surprise if there were not sufficient order for us to anticipate what is likely to come next. If we guess too accurately, say in listening to a tune that is no more than walking up and down the keyboard in one-step intervals, there is no surprise at all. Good music, like a person's life or the pageant of history, is a wonderous mixture of explanation and unanticipated turns. There is nothing new about this insight, but what Voss has done is to suggest a mathematical measure of the mixture."