Number fetishism

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 its processing.

This paper gives an overview of the different ways writers have used the concept of information theory to analyze music. 1956 becomes my starting point. That year the IEEE Conference of Radio Engineers brought together speakers such as Miller, Herbert and Simon, and Chomsky presenting papers on information theory. It was at this time that the general public (including composers and musicologists) became aware of the implications of information theory in the new intellectual atmosphere.

My material comes from American and European music journals in which there was a trend for information theoretical analyses at this time. The trend eventually trailed off in the 1970s when the ideas did not die, but were incorporated (whether directly or indirectly) into new methods of analysis.
The breadth of analytical methods is surprising. In the 1950s and 60s it was used on different music from different historical periods — from Medieval music to Webern and beyond. The methods used are diverse. Some analyses concentrated on whole pieces and the information theoretical implications of certain forms, some on chunks of music concentrating on the effectiveness of the analysis itself if using different depths of informational analysis. Other methods analyzed information flow from the viewpoint of the composer (the analysis of the score) and yet others from the viewpoint of the listener. The development of the writings and compositions of Lejaren Hiller forms the backbone of my work. He wrote several articles applying information theoretical methods to musical analysis.

By extending the analyses of Hiller I assess the effectiveness of his work and explore the degree to which the reader can glean the same kind of data from an informational analysis that they can from a ‘regular’ musical analysis.