Musical Style, Psychoaesthetics, And Prospects For Entropy As An Analytic Tool

摘要

Information theory as formulated by Shannon (1948) has been intermittently pursued as a potential tool for musical analysis; however, significant problems have prevented it from coalescing into a fruitful theoretical approach. Papers examining music from the perspective of information theory are widely distributed among journals from different fields (Nettelheim 1997) and do not show a steady, cumulative trajectory in time. Rather, a cluster of papers in the late 1950s and 1960s (Pinkerton 1956; Meyer 1957; Youngblood 1958; Krahenbuehl and Coons 1959; Cohen 1962; Hiller and Fuller 1967), another in the 1980s (Knopoff and Hutchinson 1981, 1983; Snyder 1990), and a few contemporary studies (Huron 2006; Temperley 2007) represent the primary efforts.