Meaning in Music and Information Theory

Meyer, Leonard B.

doi:10.2307/427154

Cited by 114 publications

(76 citation statements)

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“…From a musicological perspective, it has been proposed that perceptual groups are associated with points of closure where the ongoing cognitive process of expectation is disrupted either because the context fails to stimulate strong expectations for any particular continuation or because the actual continuation is unexpected (Meyer 1957;Narmour 1990, see section 2.1.2). These proposals can be given precise informationtheoretic definitions (MacKay 2003;Manning and Schu« tze 1999) by reference to a model of sequences, e i , composed of symbols drawn from an alphabet E (see section 2.3.5 for notational conventions).…”

Section: The Idyom Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Expectation and Probabilistic Learning in Auditory Boundary Perception: A Model Comparison

2010

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Introduction Grouping and boundary perception are central to the understanding and modelling of core tasks in many areas of cognitive science. They are fundamental processes in, for example, natural language processing (eg speech segmentation and word discoveryöBrent 1999b; Jusczyk 1997), motor learning (eg identifying behavioural episodes öReynolds et al 2007; Newtson 1973), memory storage and retrieval (eg chunkingöKurby and Zacks 2007) and visual perception (eg analysing spatial organisation öMarr 1982). Our focus in this paper is on the perception and cognition of music (Krumhansl 1990; Temperley 2001), where the process by which the human perceptual system groups sequential musical elements together is one of the most fundamental issues. In particular, we examine the grouping of musical elements into contiguous segments that occur sequentially in time or, to put it another way, the identification of boundaries between the final element of one segment and the first element of the subsequent one. This way of structuring a musical surface is usually referred to as grouping (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983) or segmentation (Cambouropoulos 2006). We distinguish this kind of perceptual aggregation of auditory elements from the integration, or fusion, of auditory elements that occur simultaneously in time and also from the segregation of parallel auditory streams (Bregman 1990). In musical terms, the kinds of groups we consider correspond with motifs, phrases, sections and other aspects of musical form. We use the term grouping structure to refer to a piece of music structured in this way. It is taken that, just as speech is perceptually segmented into phonemes, and then words which subsequently provide the building blocks for the perception of phrases and complete utterances (Brent 1999b; Jusczyk 1997), motifs or phrases in music are identified by listeners, stored in memory and made available for inclusion in higher-level structural groups (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983; Peretz 1989; Tan et al 1981). The lowlevel organisation of the musical surface into groups allows the use of these primitive perceptual units in more complex structural processing and may alleviate demands on memory.

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Section: The Idyom Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Expectation and Probabilistic Learning in Auditory Boundary Perception: A Model Comparison

2010

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“…The relationship between structure and complexity in music and human cognition has been long recognized (Meyer, 1967). It is beyond our aim to speculate about the value of biodiversity analysis to study psychological aspects related to music.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological Approaches to Quantifying (Bio)Diversity in Music

Angeler¹,

Benavent-Corai²

2017

Preprint

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This paper introduces an ecological approach to quantifying diversity in musical compositions. The approach considers notations with distinct pitches and duration as equivalents of species in ecosystems, measures within a composition as equivalents of ecosystems, and the sum of measures (i.e., the entire composition) as a landscape in which ecosystems are embedded. Structural diversity can be calculated at the level of measures ("alpha diversity") and the entire composition ("gamma diversity"). An additional metric can be derived that quantifies the structural differentiation between measures in a composition ("beta diversity"). We demonstrate the suitability of the approach in music using specifically composed examples and real songs that vary in complexity. We discuss the potential of the approach with selected examples from a potentially ample spectrum of applications within musicology research. The method seems particularly suitability for hypothesis testing to objectively identify many of the intricate phenomena in music. Because the approach extracts information present in the compositions -it lets the songs tell their structure -it can complement more complex modeling approaches used by music scholars. Combined such approaches provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research. They can help to fill knowledge gaps, stimulate further research and increase our understanding of music.

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“…The use of cross entropy in a probabilistic predictive/generative context was introduced by Conklin and Witten [4] who also note that Meyer [6] relates musical experience and entropy. Collins et al [3] use entropy as part of a stylistic consistency metric.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross Entropy as a Measure of Musical Contrast

Laney

Samuels

Capulet

2015

Mathematics and Computation in Music

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Abstract. We present a preliminary study of using the information theoretic concept of cross entropy to measure musical contrast in a symbolic context, with a focus on melody. We measure cross entropy using the Information Dynamics Of Music (IDyOM) framework. Whilst our long term aim is to understand the use of contrast in sonata form, in this paper we take a more general perspective and look at a broad spread of Western art music of the common practice era. Our results suggest that cross entropy has a useful role as an objective measure of contrast, but that a fuller picture will require more work.

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Meaning in Music and Information Theory

Cited by 114 publications

References 0 publications

The Role of Expectation and Probabilistic Learning in Auditory Boundary Perception: A Model Comparison

The Role of Expectation and Probabilistic Learning in Auditory Boundary Perception: A Model Comparison

Ecological Approaches to Quantifying (Bio)Diversity in Music

Cross Entropy as a Measure of Musical Contrast

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