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On Oct 15, 2010, at 11:40 AM, Jon Ippolito wrote: > I have always thought Shannon got too much attention from humanists. I don't see how his theory applies to anything but statistics about communication defined within a quantifiable frame of reference. By contrast, I think noise can be very important to the meaning of communication. "Today's technocrats and their followers treat music as a message which the composer (source) sends to a listener (receiver). In this way they believe that the solution to the problem of the nature of music and of the arts in general lies in the formulae taken from information theory. Drawing up an account of bits or quanta of information transmitted and received would this seem to provide them with "objective" and scientific criteria of aesthetic value. Yet apart from elementary statistical recipes the theory--which is valuable for technological communications--has proved incapable of giving the characteristics of aesthetic value even for a simple melody of J. S. Bach. Identifications of music with message, with communications, and with language are schematizations whose tendency is toward absurdities and dessications." Iannis Xenakis, 1967