Rollins College Rollins Scholarship Online Honors Program Theses Spring 2021 Entropy in Music: An Analysis of Shape Note Music in Terms of Information Entropy Kyle Major
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.rollins.edu/honors Part of the Computer Sciences Commons, Musicology Commons, and the Music Practice Commons Recommended Citation Major, Kyle, "Entropy in Music: An Analysis of Shape Note Music in Terms of Information Entropy" (2021). Honors Program Theses. 152. https://scholarship.rollins.edu/honors/152 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by Rollins Scholarship Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Program Theses by an authorized administrator of Rollins Scholarship Online. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Major 1 Entropy in Music: An Analysis of Shape Note Music in Terms of Information Entropy Honors Thesis, Rollins College Kyle Major Major 2 1. Abstract At first glance, the disciplines of music and computer science might seem like distinct and almost mutually exclusive fields. Music is often thought of as a subjective discipline rooted largely in a complex balance of aesthetic qualities such as pitch, rhythm, intonation, and dynamic contrast, while computer science is often seen as a discipline grounded in the ability to work with, and sometimes even think like calculating, logical, efficient machinery. And yet beneath the surface there are plenty of ways in which human sensibilities become important in computer science. One major example would be the entire subfield of Human Computer Interaction, which is built around the ability to help users take advantage of an interface to perform a task.