Entropy, melody, beauty: composing with information theory

ABSTRACT

Within a few years of information theory’s popularisation through the writings of Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, its basic framework was adopted and adapted by a loose network of music theorists, composers, and aestheticians, for whom a core principle of information theory – that ‘the aesthetic content of music can be treated in terms of fluctuations between the two extremes of total randomness and total redundancy’ (Hiller and Isaacson 1959, 110) – became an article of faith. Although it was sometimes imagined to offer a neutral conceptual framework for thinking about artmaking or a scientific alternative to the vagueness of previous artistic discourses, information theory was necessarily embroiled in the aesthetic debates of its time. In this paper I examine the encounter between information theory and musical composition in the middle of the twentieth century, paying special attention to the question of how the reception of information-theoretical concepts among composers and theorists inflected pre-existing debates about the nature and function of music in modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• Information theory
• computer music
• experimental music

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Thomas Patteson

Thomas Patteson is a specialist in twentieth-century music. He is author of the book Instruments for New Music (University of California Press, 2016), a study of experimental sound technologies developed in Germany during the Weimar Republic, which received the 2017 Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society. His translations of essays by Theodor Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus recently appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Timbre (2021).