Noise and Entropy in Music: on the Stochasticity of Musical Signals

(revised version) Corn Driesprong (s1947990) c.p.driesprong@student.rug.nl Arts & New Media - Dr. A. Roch March 9th, 2012 The source of the new is the random Gregory Bateson 1. Introduction This paper considers the role of noise in music from the perspective of information theory. More specifically, it applies to digitally (PCM-)sampled musical signals the concept of entropy, as, introduced, among other groundbreaking concepts, by Claude Elwood Shannon in his landmark paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948). Information theory has been applied to music by various authors to account for the structures of expectation and surprise that constitute musical pieces (e.g. Moles, Youngblood, Knopoff and Hutchinson). These analyses, however, are generally concerned with the analysis of discrete musical pitches, as transcribed in the scores, and therefore overlook the influence of timbre and harmonic structure of on the perception of 'musical information'. In the 1940s and -50s, electronic techniques emerged which allowed composers to record, manipulate and synthesize musical sounds, opening music up to all kinds of noises and concrete sounds (l'object sonore (Schaeffer)). As these techniques where pioneered by composers such as Pierre Schaeffer (France), Karlheinz Stockhausen (Germany), Iannis Xenakis (Greece/France) and Jean-Claude Risset (France/USA), the need arose for a theory to conceptualize the relation between abstract musical ideas and recorded musical sound, as established methods for music analysis (e.g. Schenkerian analysis) failed to account for the sonic structure of sounds on a physiological level, considering timbre merely secondary to the parameters of pitch and duration of musical sounds. Information theory forms a suitable starting point for this, as it provided a way to objectivize music on the level of encoded physical energy rather than the semantic categories of pitches and harmony. In the following paragraph we briefly consider the role and noises and concrete sounds throughout the history of music from an aesthetic and conceptual viewpoint. Here we also note the decisive influence of Friedrich A. Kittler in theorizing the reemergence of noise in music as a result of the development of sound-recording media at the beginning of the 20 th century. In the following paragraph, we explain the concept of entropy and see how it has been applied to music. In the fourth paragraph, the relative entropies for several types of musical signals are measured, testing the hypothesis that noisier types of sound display higher entropy. And finally, in the last chapter, we draw conclusions from these findings and provide suggestions for further research.

2. Music and noise Noise is a word that usually conjures up myriad meanings and connotations. Its associations include notions of chaos, disturbance, uncertainty, dissonance, transgression of boundaries, the Dionysian, entropy and death. Its meaning is inherently evasive since, according to Friedrich Kittler, it stems from Jacques Lacan's domain of the Real: the primordial, pre-lingual, ontological state which evades verbalization. We can however shed some light on the matter by following Torben Sangild's triptych definition of noises: acoustic noise sounds which display an irregular waveform without periodicity and many simultaneous frequencies, communicative noise the distortion of a signal during its transmission from source to destination, imposed from internally (withing the transmitting medium) or externally, and subjective noise the subjective and shifting definition of sounds considered annoying, unhealthy or even dangerous (Sangild). From ancient Greece through the Middle Ages, music was primarily thought of as the science of ratio and melody, and thus separated (or 'castrated' as Jacques Attali would have it), made immune to and even opposed to noise. During the course of the 17th century, this division culminated in the musical piece attaining the status of a secular, autonomous artwork, a development that was influenced by the development of European indoor culture, e.g., the invention of plate glass and the subsequent sharpening of the demarcation between indoor and outdoor space, which helped to establish music as a privileged mode of sound, separated from the clamor of everyday life by the walls of the concert hall. In the beginning, of the 20th century, however, a new paradigm shift occurred, as theorized by Friedrich A. Kittler in his seminal work Grammophon Film Typewriter (1986). The conceptualization of frequency and the development of technologies for the recording and manipulation meant the disintegration of the symbolic categories of tone and harmony and brought music back into the concrete world of waveforms and moving air. Music was no longer the Platonist particular instance of the singular universal idea, but becomes inherently and inevitably noisy. As the grammophone, tape, cd and mp3 became music's primary media, virtually every instance of technologically mediated musical communication became noisy, measurable as signal-to-noise ratio. Only discrete, digital systems can be, in theory, noiseless, however, since sound cannot be perceived as a discrete signal, it is inherently tied to analog transmission which necessarily induces some amount of noise. Recorded music (or sound) therefore always has to deal with noise. 3. Information theory and musical entropy Throughout this paper I will attempt to show that to understand music in terms of a continuous information signals is a very fruitful approach in attempting to define a theory of musical analysis for works whose primary medium is the recording (e.g. musique concrte and most (electronic) popular music), as opposed to the classical paradigm of music as the conveyance of an abstract idea written in a score, on which most traditional musicology is based. Thus, we first need to define the notion of musical information. As Pareyon states: For information theory, 'information' means possibility of deviation in the sequence of a probabilistic tree where 'low information' means high predictability and () high predictability means 'low information' (Pareyon: 207, emphases in original).

The main concern of information theory is the transmission of a message from a sender to a receiver. This process can be represented in the following scheme:

(Shannon: 2) Shannon introduced to concept of entropy to measure the uncertainty associated with variables transmitted through a communication system. The higher the entropy in a message, the smaller the possibility to determine what the next state of the system will be. For example, with coin-tossing, a fair coin can be considered to have maximum entropy, as there is no way to determine what the next outcome will be, whereas a false coin will always produce the same output, and therefore has zero entropy. Entropy can thus effectively be understood as a message's ability to resist corruption (Culpepper: 17), where lower entropy means higher resistance. It is usually expressed in bits per unit (e.g. per letter in an alphabet), referring to the binary function (on or off / given state either occurs or not) The term entropy is originally borrowed thermodynamics, where is refers to the distribution of energy in thermodynamic system. A concept closely related to entropy is that of redundancy, which denotes the amount of data that does not communicate any information (and is thus redundant), but may be useful to ensure intelligibility, for example through a noisy channel. For example, Shannon states that approximately 50% of the English language is redundant, which means that if about half of the letters in a text are removed, the original can generally still be recognized and restored (Shannon: 15). 3.1 Entropy in music That a probabilistic structure can be established for (tonal) music is evident in techniques for algorithmic composition, which generate music based, for instance, on Markov chains determining the order of notes by chance operations. Just as language, musical practice is for a large part based on convention. Whereas an overmuch adherence to these conventions makes for predictable and thus unexciting music, a total divergence from conventions defies understanding and renders the music unintelligible to the listener. In terms of information theory, a particular piece of music's place on the continuum between adherence to, or deflexion from established norms can be defined as its entropy. In a tonal sense, some music, such as Steve Reich's process-based pieces, is highly predictable (i.e. redundant), while other music, for instance Webern's serial pieces, displays a high degree of entropy. The redundancy rate of most music, however, hovers somewhere in between these two extremes. It should once again be noted that the predictability of a piece of music is very much connected to its style, as it helps to establish the conventions which the piece should follow. It is often suggested that the breaking of established expectations constitutes the appeal of a particular piece of music. An example is the famous 'Tristan chord' in the opening of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde where the established tonality is subverted by a highly ambiguous chord. This (un)predictability can thus be considered defining aspect of many musical pieces' appeal, and therefore represents fertile ground for musical analysis, in which entropy forms a powerful concept 3

for the measuring of predictability based on established norms. Authors such as Knopoff and Hutchington and Youngblood attempted to calculate the relative entropies of musical pieces. However, these analyses encounter many problems, such as how to deal with key modulation and chromaticism (Culpepper: 25). This shows that the relationship between measurable 'musical entropy' and subjective listener's experience of musical probability in not always straightforward. The application of information theory to artistic works thus needs to be done with caution, since it with the communication of basic information, and therefore not so much with meaning, the study of which seems confined to the domain of semiotics and hermeneutics. As Kittler notes, with the differentation of optics, acoustics and writing, a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic (Kittler: 16). Thus, this division, as well as information theory - the study of transmission of 'matter' through communication technologies, is inherently tied to the emergence of these media (the gramophone and all its subsequent incarnations) that came to be the primary carriers of musical information since the 20th century. Therefore, when applied appropriately, concepts from information theory can tell us a lot of interesting things about music. Exactly because they measure the information and not the meaning, they are less sensitive to subjectivity and cultural bias in the analysis of works of art. It is thus crucial to note that the perceived predictability on the part of the listener may be biased by particular cultural context, e.g., conventions of style. For example, chromatic ornamentations in baroque music may render the information content of this music high when the entropy is calculated on the basis of pitches' adherence to the home key (the method of Youngblood and Knopoff and Hutchinson), as they constitute frequent occurences of scale-foreign notes, while in fact they serve as a distinct characteristic of the style, and are thus in fact very expected and predictable. The present study is however solely concerned with objectively measurable elements of the analyzed material, and does therefore not account for the study external conventions and subjective interpretations, which is the realm of hermeneutic musicology. As is shown by Culpepper, and also implicitly by Shannon, we can distinguish entropy on at least two levels: its basic alphabet-level based notion, as well as a word-based entropy. Whereas the first reflects the characteristics, i.e. the robustness, of the language in which the text is written, the second reveals the density of information contained within a particular text. Culpepper demonstrates this by similarly corrupting an excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and the postmodern novel At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann 'O Brien, showing that the former is still much more intelligible after corruption, owing to its expansive writing style (Culpepper: 12). Shannon describes a similar effect in comparing Basic English to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, as representing two extremes English language-redundancy (Shannon: 15). Here, however, entropy becomes intertwined with subjective processes of signification through language. While these processes can to some extent be objectified (as for example as in Naom Chomsky's generative grammar), it can never be fully accounted for in mathematical models, as is intuitively clear. The phenomenon of word-based entropy connects to the concept of isotopy, borrowed from topology, in semiotics, as developed by A.J. Greimas 1, which constitutes the repetition of a basic meaning element in a text to establish homogeneity and thus ensure intelligibility over the course of text. We can thus state that the higher the level of isotopy of a text, the lower it's word-based entropy.

1 For more elaborate development of this concept, refer to Umberto Eco's Semiotics and philosophy of language, Indiana University Press

4. The entropy of continuous sampled waveforms As stated, most attempts to measure the entropy of music are founded on a method that based itself on a conception of music as discrete pitches at fixed intervals, rather than a continuous stream of sound. In the present study, however, we will look at the physiological level of sound by applying information theory to signal-analysis. As early as 1976, Voss and Clarke find the spectral density fluctuations similar to those of pink noise to appear in many phenomena, including vacuum tubes and nerve membranes (Voss: 258). Furthermore, they find its power spectrum to be similar to the average spectrum of tonal harmonic music, meaning PCM sampled waveform that the tonal fluctuations (that can be measured as entropy) of (source: Wikipedia) most music display a similar, pink noise-like, pattern. This implies that the correlative structure of a signal corresponds to its content ,i.e., the signal contains music (or meaning) rather than noise. In current digital media, continuous streams are also necessarily made discrete through a method called Pulse-Code Modulation (PCM), which encodes the physical energy of the sound into discrete binary values, as the continuous signal theoretically contains an infinite number of values which would require a transmission channel with infinite capacity to be encoded. However, as Shannon notes, it is clear physically that this quantization of the volume into individual points cannot in any practical situation alter the final answer significantly, provided the regions are sufficiently small (Shannon: 42). Thus, given that we have an channel with sufficient capacity and the signal can be quantized into sufficiently small parts, usually 44100 samples per second with 16-bit sample resolution in the case of PCM encoding, the difference from a continuous signal is not noticeable by human cognition and the basic method for encoding (and thus for entropy calculation) is the same as in the discrete cases. In this chapter we measure the relative entropies of different types of sounds, while accounting for their periodic autocorrelation, which means that the degree of the signal is related to a slightly lagged version of itself, so as to measure the relation of each sample to preceding values. Relative entropy means that the obtained entropy rate is relative to the maximum possible entropy of the signal, i.e., when all possible values would be equally likely to occur. We measure the relative rather than in the objective entropy (expressed in bits) as we want to know the unpredictability of a signal relative to it's theoretical maximum unpredictability, and are not so much interested the minimum bandwidth which is necessary to transmit it (the general use of information theory in engineering). In general, data containing musical information can be said to display a rather chaotic structure when compared to other types of data. This is illustrated by the fact that lossless data-compression algorithms cannot substantially compress an audio file as there is relatively little repetitive structure or consecutive series of bits. The question, however, is to which extent the structure of the sound contained within the data influences the entropy of the data, in other words, whether data containing a high degree of noise or noises, i.e., sounds displaying a chaotic, non-periodic structure, can be said to have a higher entropy. The hypothesis is that noisier sounds indeed show a higher degree of entropy since their structure is more chaotic and random.

4.1 Method In the following experiment, the first-order relative entropy of the sample series of sampled waveforms of several sounds are calculated. The measured sounds have a standard sample rate of 44100 Hz/sec. The values of the samples within the sound file were recorded and sorted by frequency of occurrence. Then, the probability of each sample value was calculated, based on its number of occurrences in the taken sample. From these probabilities, the entropy (H) is calculated by the following formula, as given by Shannon (Shannon: 10):

Where p(x) denotes the probability of each sample to occur. Finally, the relative entropy of the sample set is obtained by calculating the ratio of the resulting entropy against the highest possible entropy, i.e., the entropy that would result from all the sample values occurring with equal probability. 4.2. Analyzed material In this study we calculate the entropy values for three different basic types of sounds. First, we analyze a short sample of white noise (also 1/f0 noise), i.e., a random signal with flat power spectral density (equal power at any frequency). The name white noise stems from its analogy with white light, in which the power distribution is also equal over the entire visible band. Secondly, we look at a sample of a sinusoid wave, the most basic harmonic unit. The entropy of a sine wave can easily be calculated theoretically, without measurement of a sound sample, but by taking samples of a sin function instead. However, we measured an actual sample in order to account for possible noise induced by sampling process. Furthermore, to include some concrete and musical examples, we analyze a sample of recorded English speech2 as well as a recording of the first movement of Beethoven's 5 th symphony, The conjecture is that the samples of noise and speech display a higher degree of relative entropy than the sine-wave and musical samples, owing to the latter's harmonic characteristics. 4.3 Results We find that the white noise sample displays a relative entropy of .97, which is close to the maximum entropy of 1. When accounting for the signal's autocorrelation, we obtain a relative entropy of 0.95, meaning that there is little to no correlation between subsequent samples. These results also imply that the entropy of this signal is very high and the data size can be reduced by a maximum of 3-5% in lossless encoding operations. It also confirms our conjecture that white noise, being the most random instance of a continuous signal, displays a very high degree of entropy. The entropy of a noiseless sine wave can be calculated theoretically without measuring, as it is an non-stochastic reiterating function, which means that the probability density is basically fixed. However, since the sinusoid is a reiterative function, first-order entropy calculation, taking no account of correlation between samples, would be quite biased. A better approximation of the entropy in relation to its harmonic structure would be obtained by a measurement accounting for the signal's autocorrelation, as it would account for the periodic structure and the high level of correlation in the signal, which gives a relative entropy of 0.82, meaning that there is a higher degree of correlation between subsequent samples than in the noise example. In fact, being the result of a determinable mathematical function, the sample is theoretically entirely predictable. The
2 A one-minute excerpt from a audiobook recording of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, read by an American-English voice-actor.

lack of correlative measurement is not much an issue for the noise sample, as it's structure is much more random, and therefore a first-order measurement gives a fairly good approximation of their entropy rates. Furthermore, the excerpt of recorded english speech displays a relative entropy of 0.95, which is relatively high due to the random and non-harmonic structure of speech sounds, yet lower than the entropy of pure noise, presumably because of the harmonicity of vowels. Finally, the entropy of the first movement of Beethoven's 5th symphony is 0.87, which is yet again lower because of the very harmonic structure of the musical sounds, yet higher than the pure sine wave because of a higher number of non-periodic/noisy elements in the sound (e.g. non-harmonic partials in the instrument's sounds and transients at the onset of played notes). For these last two measurements we did not account for autocorrelations as the calculations would become very involved and would take a very long time to compute. This is something that may be included in future research. 5. Conclusions Signal-processing based analysis as conducted above deals with the raw physiological matter of sound. While the calculations conducted in this paper are still very basic, they show that entropymeasurement of continuous samples can open up very interesting possibilities for music analysis indeed. As Friedrich Kittler states, recorded sounds are instances of the Real. They represent the noise and clamor of reality, before the subjective extraction of meaning, yet some of them display more stochasticity than others. Whereas information theory approaches to tonal harmony might need to stretch themselves to represent the subjective listening experience, the measuring of signal's entropy shows the fluctuations and variations of energy within the entire band of human auditory perception, and thus represents a measure of the stochasticity of the basis of musical sound. For example, the ubiquity of pink noise patterns throughout a wide range of phenomena suggests the fascinating conclusion that music somehow functions as an imitation of omnipresent patterns of similarity and change, or redundancy and entropy. Whereas Voss and Clarke looked at spectral power fluctuations, similar relations may be uncovered by investigating the patterns in the values of sampled waveforms, as has been done in this study. Possibilities for further research include a musical 'word-based' entropy calculation which takes into account entire iterations of waveforms and calculates the entropies based in the divergences from periodic functions. Another possibility is the investigation of the distribution of entropy-density over musical time, to assess whether the signal of some segments of a composition (e.g. the development in a sonata) displays a higher degree of entropy than others, or whether one can discern a gradual increase in complexity ('richness') of timbres and micro-level stochasticity over the course of a musical piece, as a way of linear development. Coming back to Torben Sangilds threefold definition of noises, we can state that in information theory, noise is generally considered as communicative noise, i.e., a disruption in the transmission of a signal. However, acoustic noises themselves can also be measured as information, and can be disrupted as they contain high entropy, thus a densely concentrated amount of information, rendering them highly vulnerable to communicative noise. Here the volatile relationship between information and meaning once again becomes clear, as, while noise (i.e. 'entropous' signals), from the perspective of information theory, contains a lot of information, its meaning is often highly evasive and ambiguous and understood as impure and irregular frequencies, something lacking or resisting meaning (Kromhout: 24). The high level of sensory stimulation they bring about, might be experienced as information overload, and noise becomes the threshold where information 7

becomes disinformation, nonsense. In our time noise indeed means everything and/or nothing. (Kromhout: 29). It is for this reason that noise is often associated with concepts such as Dionysian ecstasy, the Sublime or the Real, i.e., something that is so overwhelming that it defies immediate comprehension. This experience, finally, can be understood as the subjective definition of noise. The goal of this paper has been to show that information theory, an particularly the notion of entropy, form fruitful concepts to facilitate the analysis of digitally sampled musical signals. The experiments conducted have confirmed the hypothesis that the complexity of these signals can effectively be measured in terms of entropy. Appendix 1: used software The noise samples were generated using the open-source audio editing software Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). The sample values were obtained and the entropy levels were calculated using the GNU-licensed high-level mathematical language Octave (http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/), for which I thank dr. Kai Lassfolk at the University of Helsinki for pointing me to.

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