An Objective Basis for Music Theory: Information-Dynamic Analysis of Minimalist Music

We present evidence for a relationship between two objective measures of the information dynamics of music and points of structural importance in the music as analysed by an expert musicologist. Our approach is motivated by ecological validity: rather than taking musical stimuli and artificially simplifying them to make their study tractable, we have sought and found music which is appropriate to our study. We give a novel, detailed analysis of one piece, Glass’ Gradus, and show how the analysis corresponds with the information dynamics of the piece as heard. To show that this correspondence generalises, at least to music in a similar style by the same composer, we go on to analyse Glass’ Two Pages. We suggest that this research provides further evidence that information-dynamic modelling is a worthwhile approach to the study of music cognition and also has the potential, if automated, to be a powerful tool to increase objectivity in data-based music analysis.