Papers
The Certainty, the Impossible, and what Lies Between: Investigating Information Theory as a Tool for Shaping Expectancy
This paper [updated as of 23/11/2009] is a preliminary investigation on the application of information theory as an interactive compositional process for shaping expectancy. Original publication: Benvenuti, Christian. “The certainty, the impossible, and what lies between: Investigating information theory as a tool for shaping expectancy.” Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference for PhD Music Students (2009): 243-252.
This paper is a preliminary investigation on the application of information theory as an interactive compositional process for shaping expectancy. Building upon Claude E. Shannon’s paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” as well as subsequent works on the field, this study aims at the freedom of choice that a composer has in working with his/her materials – which, in information theory, translates into the level of entropy – and how it drives the pace of events across time. Such freedom is directly reflected by the degree of uncertainty generated by a composer’s choices, and in this regard most situations in music are neither completely chaotic, being impossible to foresee its events in any level, nor completely ordered, when there is absolute certainty about what comes next; rather, what lies between those two opposites is generally a controlled fluctuation of information. It shall be investigated a possible application of information theory, through which the composer could establish a controlled bias towards “order” or “chaos”, shape the degree of uncertainty across time, and generate music material.
Keywords: music composition; information theory; communication; uncertainty; meaning
LikeJo-Ha-Kyu: Aesthetic and Structural Motivations in Musical Composition
Masters dissertation in Music Composition (in Portuguese)
This work investigates compositional processes from a set of four pieces composed between 2004 and 2005 during the Master Degree Programme in Composition at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. Considerations regarding both aesthetic and structural motivations from the pieces are presented, especially those concerning the Eastern concept called "jo-ha-kyu", the traditional Japanese Noh drama and the traditional Japanese martial art called "iaijutsu". The jo-ha-kyu concept and its expression as it is found in Noh drama and iaijutsu were used as a creative impulse and global principle for the pieces' inner sectioning and character, guiding also the sequential order of the pieces in a programme. This work also presents the consequences from those aesthetic and structural motivations by providing formal coherence to the pieces.
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