News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? (2024). Parent comment

Re:What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? (2024) by pontusrehula on Wednesday December 03, 2025 @05:45AM (#46132941)
> You can treat music as information. If it's not information, it's just noise.

In information theory we have:

A message has maximal information content if (and only if) its symbols are statistically indistinguishable from random noise.

Noise or noise-like elements are also important part of many kinds of music.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? (2024) by robot-wrangler on Wednesday December 03, 2025 @06:18AM (#46133177)
This is why a better acronym for IDM is Information Dense Music, it's less pretentious and it explains why it's very close to noise ;)

Of course, I'd argue Bach and Debussy are very information-dense too but they somehow manage to stay uncluttered. The really great thing about music is that encodes information on many different levels, Claude Shannon notwithstanding

[ Parent | on HN ]