A few brief notes on _Atonality, Information, and...

Somebody posted this URL:

http://thinkingapplied.com/tonality_folder/tonality.htm

Containing article, _Atonality, Information, and the Politics of Perception_.

Brief notes...

>Although attempts have been made to establish an acoustical foundation for
>tonality ...

No mention of Rothenberg's work.

>... there is evidence that tonality is a learned response to a collection
>of musical data. ... Consider the following:
>
> a. Although the roots assigned to certain chords can be substantiated
> acoustically, the general population has difficulty hearing which of
> the chord tones is, in fact, the root; even for some musically
> sophisticated persons the task is not easy.

This is already a foot note, but it is here where I'd like to see a note
with a reference! The statment seems to assume that all chords are rooted
on one of their tones... a potentially fatal omission of the possibility
of virtual fundamentals.

>b. If tonality is not learned, but an acoustical property of a collection
>of tones, then a given set of tones should always have the same focus.
>This is not always the case, however. The formation F-A-C­D has been
>regarded by some theorists as centering on F, while others have felt that
>it centers on D.

Bzzz. Harmonic entropy (and maybe even Van Eck alone) suggests that a
given "formation" may present several foci simultaneously, even just
"acoustically".

>c. Certain collections of tones imply a tonic not contained in the
>collection. The formation G-B-D-F, even when isolated from any musical
>context, will set up a tonic of C in the minds of many listeners. The
>most reasonable explanation of this is that through the repeated
>association of G-B-D-F with C, the listener has been conditioned to
>expect the latter when he hears the former.

Can listeners be conitioned to expect certain things to happen in a
sequence? Perhaps, but this is proving something weaker than the
author needs to prove (there's a name for that...). The author implies
he is trying to show that there _isn't_ any acoustical or cognitive
(Rothenberg-like) justification for tonality. He hasn't shown this.

>Information. /.../ Let us approach its definition by way of a musical
>example that's pertinent to our discussion. Suppose that the harmonic
>vocabulary of a composer includes sonorities m and x. When he uses
>sonority m he resolves it rather freely, sometimes going to n, sometimes
>to o, sometimes to p. sometimes to q, etc. But when he uses sonority x,
>he treats it much more strictly: it only resolves to y or z. Sonority
>m, offering a greater number of choices for continuation, is said to be
>higher in information than sonority x, whose consequents are very
>restricted. Information is, then, a measure of the randomness with
>which one harmonic event is followed by another.

Let's hope this is just an example -- this is a very restricted
application of information theory, compared to what Brian and I were
discussing.

-Carl