Information theory for connecting with audiences

I just thought of a good way of understanding how to connect with audiences. It's funny, because instead thinking about audiences as a group, with various subgroups, as we have tended to so far, this approach is geared more toward the individual. It is to apply the psychological model of information theory. What better way is there to think about communicating with music than information theory, which deals with the communication of information?

The theory is that each communication consists of packets of meaning (either in word form or musical note form). Each word when communicated, gets your mind going, thinking about the meaning of the word, and then thinking about what might come after the word. Also, each word does not have to convey an equal amount of information. For example, take the word “God.” It has a great deal of meaning, bringing a bunch of associations in your mind. If you think about what might come next, there are so many possibilities. Then, say you add “save” onto it. Okay, so God is saving now. “Save” gives a significant amount of information that God is doing an action, namely saving, and also eliminates a lot of other possibilities. You would then probably think about who or what he is saying, and this would narrow your expectation to some noun. The next word is “the,” giving “God save the.” At this point, I think you would expect the next word to be “Queen,” based on your own personal knowledge of the world. If the next word is in fact “Queen,” then since you are already expecting it to be, it would not convey very much information. Suppose the next word had been “hippopotamus” instead. That would have foiled your expectations, surprising you, so “hippopotamus” would actually contain a lot of information. This is readily applicable to music, since there is so much setting up of expectation, resolving those expectations, prolonging them, or going against them.

And the second part to the theory is how amount of information relates to liking. If there is a lot of information in a communication, it is complex, and if there isn't, it is simple. If you imagine a graph where on the x-axis you have a range from simple (near the origin) to complex, and on the y-axis you having a range from not liking at all (near the origin) to liking a lot, the theory is that the graph relating these two parameters would be an inverted “U.” When a piece contains really little information and is simple, it will be boring so you won't like it. If the piece is really complex and you can't make heads or tails of it, you probably won't like it also. If the piece contains just the right amount of complexity for you, you will probably like it very well. Familiarity with a piece will also reduce the amount of complexity in a piece. This model explains why pop songs are immediately catchy but lose their appeal after repeated hearings. (It think it is telling that in today's society pop songs are designed this way. In the past, it was for one to immediately like the song when you heard it on the radio so you would go out and buy the CD. Now, an additional aim may be to have you impulsively buy songs off itunes. This culture of instant gratification not only makes the acquisition of music instantaneous, but also the emotional experience of music instantaneous.) It also explains why songs grow on you after repeated listenings: something that was too complex before is now more familiar and less complex. Also, we had talked in class about how the New World Symphony had introduced Shostakovich 9 and given the audience things to listen for before the performance, and how the audience really enjoyed it because they were able to hear some of the things they were listening for. The pre-program talk allowed the audience to have some expectation as to what was going to happen, and allowed them to make some sense of a complex jumble of notes. It also explains why atonal music is so difficult. It is very hard to predict what note will come next, unless you're a serialism expert, or you are already familiar with the piece. I think with atonal music, you expect to be surprised. My personal feeling is that liking atonal music means you are smugly surprised.

As for a general way of thinking about how to connect with audiences, it is important to recognize that the music we play is part of the Western music tradition. Our aim as classical musicians is not to just produce pleasant sounds to listen to. We want to communicate the meaning that the piece has for us. But the music only has meaning for us because we understand the expectations. When we talk about the progress of Western music, even something as radical as the development of atonality, it is all progress within the tradition. Because composers compose in dialogue with past composers, the tradition is continuous. The motivation for never straying too far from the tradition is, I believe, complexity. Let alone the listeners, the composer himself must understand the new music he is writing, and his taste in complexity is based on the Western tradition. It is obvious that what we think of as good music of the 20^th century, is not palatable to much of audiences because it is too complex for them. They have not had as long a time as we to familiarize ourselves with the development of Western music. We have to be careful not to become too Western music-centric. I believe information theory provides a good way of judging what music audiences would enjoy and for judging the amount of preparatory work we have to do in order to let audiences enjoy more complex pieces.