Elementos más comunes en las monedas
CAPÍTULO 2: LA CATALOGACIÓN DE ARTEFACTOS TRIDIMENSIONALES Y REALIA
Information, the mathematical quantity defined in the 1945 by the communications engineer Claude Shannon, was being used to model music as early as the beginning of the 1950s.17 Yet, ideas from
17. For modern summaries of applications of information theory in music see: Schüler, “Reflections on the History of Computer-Assisted Music Analysis II.”; Marcus T. Pearce, “Early Applications of Information Theory to Music”
information theory were more easily adapted for research into music than into some of other arts, especially the visual arts. Music was still understood to pose special challenges, but by the turn of the twentieth century, few maintained that music enjoyed a privileged biophysical pathway into the listening subject. Thus, developing an information-theoretic model of music (music as heard, at least) could draw on the rich fund of psychophysical research into the ear. In the jargon of information theory, music shared the same “channel” as speech, audible noise, and other non-musical sounds. Another reason for this was that music—at least the kind of music that Weaver imagined—already had a fully ramified notational system that drew from a finite symbol set. Music that could be notated—and, consequently, music that had been notated—yielded rather supplely to analysis in terms of the formal model of communication that Shannon outlined.
The use of concepts from or inspired by information theory by twentieth-century composers has already been identified in the musicological literature. For instance, in some histories of twentieth-century music, information theory has been identified as a motive force, a progenitive technology that shaped the musical output of the composers who brought this mathematical concept to bear on their creative practice. Cristoph Both has suggested that “the concepts of information theory” were nothing less than “the source of a crucial paradigm shift in compositional method, simultaneously giving birth to computer music in America and initiating the decay of serialism in Europe in the 1950s.”18 Both argues that, drawing on the use of elementary principles of
information theory in the composition of the Illiac Suite (1955/6) their influential computer-generated ([Unpublished MS], 2007), http://webprojects.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/marcusp/notes/music-information-theory.pdf; In French, see Laurent Fichet, Les théories scientifiques de la musique aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 172–194. Christopher Ariza has undertaken an extremely well-researched discussion of some computer music, or what the author calls “computer-aided algorithmic composition” (CAAC), that emphasizes the work of Hiller and Isaacson and the relation between CAAC and information theory. See Ariza, “An Open Design for Computer-Aided Algorithmic Music Composition.”, 36–107. Schuler and Ariza’s discussions of information theory are incidental to their broader goals, a sweeping survey of computer-aided analysis and the design of a new programming environment for CAAC, respectively. Both authors tend to grant the stability of “information theory” as a discourse on which music theorists and composers drew. The present approach differs by emphasizing that information theory was subject to diverse theoretical extensions and contexts of application, which speak to its relative instability. Nor do I discount the possibility of an influence of contemporary thought about music on the public and academic reception of information, particularly as it was argued to apply to the arts and aesthetic thought more generally.
18. Christoph Both, “The Influence of Concepts of Information Theory on the Birth of Electronic Music Composition: Lejaren A. Hiller and Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1953–1960” (University of Victoria, 1995), 3, https://hdl. handle.net/1828/6399.
composition, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson brought about a shift from “model-based” to “rule-based” composition.19 The status of Hiller and Isaacson’s Illiac Suite as a milestone in computer
music has long been recognized: it continues to be cited variously as the first computer-produced score.20 Christopher Ariza has carefully pursued some of the research into automatic composition
that Hiller and Isaacson cited as precursors and inspiration to their work, showing that this claim (at best) misrepresents their work as the point of origin for computer music. Following Ariza and others, I view Hiller and Isaacson’s work as depending on close to a decade of scattered investigation into computer applications to music, for both inspiration and for method.21 Hiller and Isaacson were
clearly interested in drawing on prior work; there are some early computer music applications about which we know very little other than what is disclosed in personal communications that are cited in
Experimental Music. Both the technical–musical basis for Illiac Suite, and (importantly) its legibility
as a landmark computer music composition were made possible by music’s informatization, a process already underway by 1957, thus both preceding and succeeding the particular moment of any single composition.
19. Both, “The Influence of Concepts of Information Theory on the Birth of Electronic Music Composition.”, 86. Though Both’s account of Hiller and Isaacson’s work is well grounded in references to early computational analysis of musical scores, his co-option of Kuhn seems ill-suited to his thesis about changing styles of music composition. The new “normal composition” rarely obliterates the prior body of compositional theory; when it comes to art, there is no great answer to the question: why can’t many paradigms be coextensive? That talk of paradigm shifts seems ill-fitting when it comes to “experimental” music suggests that more flexible theories from the history of science are better suited to discussions of musical experimentalism(s), as the work of Benjamin Piekut and others has shown. Benjamin Piekut, “Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques,” Twentieth-Century Music 11, no. 2 (September 2014):
191–215, https://doi.org/10.1017/S147857221400005X. For a discussion of the strain put on the notion of paradigm by the “cross-disciplinarity” of contemporary scientific research, see the writing of Mario Biagioli. For Biagoli, formations of contemporary academics with diverse expertise co-operate to carry out research directed at a “problem.” These temporary assemblages had relatively short lifespans: insufficient time for these researchers to form a stable disciplinary identity as such, or to build an institution. A similar argument could be made for musicians who collaborate with technicians on music making use of emerging music technology. Mario Biagioli, “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 816–33, https://doi.org/10.1086/599586, 822ff.
20. Though rarely without some hedging qualifier: “Lejaren Hiller was the first composer to have extensively investigated computer-aided composition.” Charles Dodge and Thomas A. Jerse, Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance, 2nd edition (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 3745.
21. Ariza, for instance, suggests that the earlier work of David Caplin and Dietrich Prinz in 1955 “may be the first use of a computer to generate not just sound (as was done as early as 1950 or 1951 […]), but new musical structures.” Christopher Ariza, “Two Pioneering Projects from the Early History of Computer-Aided Algorithmic Composition,” Computer Music Journal 35, no. 3 (2011): 40–56, 40. See also, William Brooks, “In Re: ‘Experimental Music’,” Contemporary Music Review 31, no. 1 (February 2012): 37–62, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2012.712282.
In her sweeping overview of the contents of the short-lived but influential Die Riehe, M. J. Grant identifies information theory as one of the primary scientific influences on post-War European avant garde music.22 She briefly discusses both the publication of Werner Meyer-Eppler’s
“Informationstheoretische Probleme der musikalischen Kommunikation” in the last issue of Die Reihe and that of Abraham Moles’s Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (orig. 1958), identifying Meyer-Eppler and Moles as two of the more influential proponents of information theory within the community of experimental musicians within the orbit of that journal.
In a recent book, Jennifer Iverson builds on the work of Both and Grant to provide a subtler account of information theory on compositional technique in the late 1950s. Iverson is especially sensitive to the negative consequences of adopting a blunt technological determinism when it comes to electronic music. Her history seeks out those “invisible collaborators” held in common by post-war composers that have to date been overlooked. This oversight has been partly due to a tendency to overemphasize the significance of differences between the technology available at the various continental sites of elektronische Musik. Histories tend to focus on music affiliated with a single studio, and neglect to consider the exchange of ideas and personnel between sites. Iverson persuasively argues that, despite their tendency to demur when asked about the extent to which contemporary scientific theories influenced their compositional work, composers affiliated to the West-Deutscher Rundfunk (WDR) studio in Cologne availed themselves of ideas that originated in information theory discourses.23 Werner Meyer-Eppler was Germany’s leading exponent of
information theory who exerted an influence not only his pupil Stockhausen but, as Iverson argues, also influenced Ligeti and Xenakis whose direct contact with him was more limited. Iverson posits “information theory discourse” as the unrecognized common source of talk of probability distributions, “perceptual Gestalten” and the implications of Shannon’s sampling theorem in the work
22. M. J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe, Music in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 29–33.
23. Jennifer Iverson, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 21. As well as in many other intellectual currents, such as phonetics etc. Elena Ungeheuer.
and writings of these post-war avant garde composers.24 Identifying information theory as a missing
link of sorts causes us to revise commonly-held assertions about the Balkanised terrain of avant garde composition, which draws a distinction between those within and without the WDR clique, which would eventually come to center around Karlheinz Stockhausen. As Iverson claims, Xenakis, whose use of the equations of mathematical physics seems to distinguish him from his peers, should be viewed as more closely allied to the Cologne group than his repeated exclusion from Darmstadt programming might suggest.
Information theory has also been influential on the development of hypotheses in music
psychology. Leonard Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) introduced the arousal–inhibition model of musical emotion, claiming that the affective capacity of music, and thus its meaning, arises from its ability to set up, defer, and sometimes completely thwart a listener’s expectations.25 Some
of these expectations arise from the application of segmentation and prediction heuristics postulated by Gestalt psychology, while others arise from the listener’s acculturation to or expertise in a given style. Collectively these expectations can be characterized as the listener’s prior knowledge—however obtained—about the probability of the occurrence of certain musical events. Since Shannon’s
information had been readily interpreted as measuring the degree of “surprisingness” following the receipt of a given message, and had been demonstrated to correspond to as much in examples with natural language (English), Meyer found much in the theory of information that could be used to retroactively buttress his position in Emotion and Meaning, which he did in a subsequent article, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory” (1957).26
Meyer’s dalliance with information theory guided laboratory investigation of musical expectation for decades by suggesting that information (or “entropy”) was a useful measure with which to compute the relative unexpectedness or unexpectedness of sequences of stimuli. That
24. Iverson, 135. Shannon’s sampling theorem provides guarantees about the faithful reconstruction of signals from sampled data, which in turn grounds much of today’s work on digital audio and electronic sound production.
25. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music.
26. Leonard B. Meyer, “Meaning in Music and Information Theory,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 4 (June 1957): 412–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/427154. In Emotion and Meaning in Music, Meyer makes the claims just once that “many of the concepts presented in this book have clear counterparts in the theory of games and in information theory.” Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, 255.
it appeared to have the imprimatur of the doyen of music psychology surely accelerated the measure’s circulation. Joseph Youngblood gave the statistical interpretation of musical style its clearest articulation in “Style as Information” (1958).27 In the same year, Edgard Coons and
David Kraehenbuehl described the results of a mathematical study of the theoretical predictability of musical forms represented as abstract formal plans (for example: a “rondo”-type form as ABACADA).28Despite the fact that their investigation made no use of music (neither notated or
sounded), they did not hesitate to title their study “Information as a Measure of Structure in Music.” Ramon Fuller, David Lewin, and Calvert Bean all published analyses making use of concepts from information theory in the pages of the then-young Journal of Music Theory in the decade between 1958 and 1968.29 Hiller’s influence on this body of work is clear; Bean and Fuller’s work is clearly
derived from their doctoral theses which were completed at Illinois under Hiller some years prior to their publication in JMT.30
This decade-long period is the first of three clusters of interest in information theory and music identified by Elizabeth Margulis and Andrew Beatty. They note that “papers examining music from the perspective of information theory are widely distributed among from different fields,” and can be divided chronologically into three periods: the first papers from the late 1950s and 1960s, another burst of research in the 1980s, and a handful of contemporary studies from the first decade
27. Joseph E. Youngblood, “Style as Information,” Journal of Music Theory 2, no. 1 (1958): 24–35, https://doi.org/ 10.2307/842928. Youngblood’s work witnessed a cursory extension to Carnatic music by Siromoney and Rajagopalan. Gift Siromoney and K. R. Rajagopalan, “Style as Information in Karnatic Music,” Journal of Music Theory 8, no. 2 (Winter 1964): 267–72, https://doi.org/10.2307/843082.
28. That is, their results are equally applicable (in the worst case, “not at all”) to the study of all forms that may be represented as sequences of selections from a finite set of categorical labels, just as a rhyme scheme represents a particular formal aspect of certain kinds of poetry. Edgar Coons and David Kraehenbuehl, “Information as a Measure of Structure in Music,” Journal of Music Theory 2, no. 2 (1958): 127–61, https://doi.org/10.2307/843197.
29. Lejaren Hiller and Ramon Fuller, “Structure and Information in Webern’s Symphonie, Op. 21,” Journal of Music Theory 11, no. 1 (1967): 60–115, https://doi.org/10.2307/842949; David Lewin, “Some Applications of Communication Theory to the Study of Twelve-Tone Music,” Journal of Music Theory 12, no. 1 (1968): 50–84, https: //doi.org/10.2307/842886; Lejaren Hiller and Calvert Bean, “Information Theory Analyses of Four Sonata Expositions,” Journal of Music Theory 10, no. 1 (1966): 96–137, https://doi.org/10.2307/843300.
30. Cf. Calvert Bean, “Information Theory Applied to the Analysis of a Particular Formal Process in Tonal Music” (DMA thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1961), https://search.proquest.com/docview/302066397; Ramon Colin Fuller, “An Information Theory Analysis of Anton Webern’s ‘Symphonie,’ Opus 21 (with) ‘Music for Two-Channel Tape and Two Percussionists”’ (DMA thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1965), https: //search.proquest.com/docview/302312294.
of the twenty-first century.31 The first waning of interest coincides with the decline in optimism
about information’s universal applicability that followed deflationary critiques lodged against its use outside of engineering which will be described in the section below. There continues to be interest in applications of information theory to the theory of music and to composition.32 This continuing—if
sporadic—explicit interest in information theory of music researchers motivates the present chapter’s approach: to understand information’s enduring promise, by looking to its history. To this end, in the next section I review critical histories of the concept of information more generally. I relate work which suggests that the modern concept of information also operates implicitly as a highly flexible metaphor outside of the original telecommunications engineering context, to include—but not limited to—the musical applications described above.