Entropy, melody, beauty: composing with information theory

Abstract

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.