Music as Information

Abstract

This chapter discusses the intellectual history of applying information theory to music. It begins with early attempts to measure aesthetic beauty and complexity in the early twentieth century, progressing to Claude Shannon’s theory of entropy and exploring how it was rapidly adopted by music theorists seeking to measure complexity, redundancy, and stylistic boundaries. A through-line of this chapter is the comparison of two university fight songs as illustrative examples. With these, the authors demonstrate how different analytical decisions—from defining musical “states” to selecting training corpora—shape the information-theoretic analysis of melodies. The authors review early applications of information theory to music, focusing on both their contributions and limitations, and the authors then turn to more recent developments that address enculturation, focusing on models that incorporate both long-term memory (learned from exposure to musical styles) and short-term memory (acquired during a piece).