Calculating musical gestures: Meyer and information theory as a model for musical communication

Abstract:
The late 1950s saw the emergence of what Herbert Simon called the science of the artificial: a collaboration of ideas from nascent computer science, linguistics, psychology, mathematics, and engineering governed by a concern for information and it’s processing.

Between about 1956 and 1971 there was a number of analysts applying information theory as a model of musical communication. The limited number of books and articles on the topic allow a clear picture to be drawn of the development of this mode of thought.

After a description of the kind of analyses that were being done in the 1950s and 60s, this paper explores the evolution of information theory as a model for musical communication, particularly through the writings of Leonard Meyer.

Leonard Meyer’s 1956 book Emotion and Meaning in Music describes music in terms of expectation without directly referring to information theory. In a subsequent article ‘Meaning in Music and Information Theory’ in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1957, Meyer allies himself with those using information theory as a model for music and outlines how the ideas in his book could be explained in terms of information theory.

This is not a paper about the merits of information theory analysis of music. It is a speculative paper about the development of a model for music. Remnants of the information theory model of musical communication remain in many current theories and analyses, and some writers even describe the abandonment of information theory in music as having thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Information theory provided the 1960s analyst with tools to try and explain the effect of musical gestures on a listener. The model was very much a product of its time.