ON THE ENTROPY OF MUSIC: AN EXPERIMENT WITH BACH CHORALE MELODIES
Date
1991-12-01
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Abstract
The information content, or "entropy", of a piece of music cannot be
determined in the abstract, but depends on the listener's familiarity
with, and knowledge of, the genre to which it belongs. This paper
describes an experiment designed to investigate human listeners' models
of music by having them guess successive notes in a piece. The experiment
was administered by a computer program, and in order to elicit subjective
probabilities, listeners gambled on the notes they guessed. The study
was restricted to the music of the Bach Chorales, and, in particular, on
the succession of pitches that comprise the melody--although our
methodology is also generally applicable to other musical parameters,
and to other genres.
A tournament was held, with categories of novice, intermediate, and
expert musician. As well as providing an overall measure of entropy
for each of two chorale melodies, the results yield entropy profiles
for the individual chorales. These give an objective, scientifically
repeatable record of the note-by-note information content of the melodies,
which can be interpreted musically in terms of expectation, suspense, and
resolution in the music.
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Computer Science