Communication and computation: outline for a compositional theory

Abstract:
Using the concept of information in association with music has been unpopular in musicology since the 1960s until relatively recently when it re-emerged in music psychology and cognition in the form of statistical learning and as the basis for models of music perception.

This paper explores the role of information as a concept in musical theory, briefly tracking its movement between musicological sub-disciplines and the way its presence in those areas changed it and why. Among theories of the 1950s included in the early relationship between music and information theory as a model for musical communication, was the theory of Edgar Coons and David Kraehenbuehl (1958). They suggested the use of information as a structuring device for composers; a compositional theory, like tonal theory, but relying on information flux to aid the translation of the composer’s intentions into musical structures without hampering his personal style or freedom of choice of musical materials. Music theorists, for several reasons, generally ignored this compositional theory. Firstly, in the late 1950s music theory in America began to be dominated by the two analytic paradigms of pitch-class set theory and Schenkerian theory. The nature of music theory as an academic pursuit changed from being inclusive of compositional theories to being almost exclusively concerned with analytic theory. Secondly, many of the applications of information theory to music in the 1950s were deemed as being unsuccessful, and so dismissed by music theorists. Coons and Kraehenbuehl’s theory, associated with these others, met with the same fate.

In the current academic climate where information theory is an acceptable part of many studies in systematic musicology, Coons and Kraehenbuehl’s theory can provide a bridge between previously disparate musicological sub-disciplines.