I used to have a substitute teacher in middle school and high school called Cesar. He would constantly express to us how frustrating it was for him to hear all Reggeaton songs because they’d have the same beat, and he’d feel like he was listening to the same song over and over again. He’d perform the beat for us, and – on a good day- show us a couple of songs to prove his point. I kept referring back to him, as I read Laurie Spiegel’s description of music composition through the lens of Information Theory. Spiegel mentions that music that is purely information, “contains no means of conveying emotions through sameness and difference, anticipation, prediction, surprise, disappointment, reassurance, or return.” I think back to the class exercises, and how big the difference between patterns with noise and random elements have to those that don’t. I hope that I can learn to manipulate noise and create engaging pieces. Perhaps some that would make Cesar proud. 

I found Spiegel’s differentiation between random corruption and random generation very useful. I had worked with noise before, but reading Spiegel’s explanation of it, and its impact on music composition made this concept much clearer for me. “using random noise (the degradation of otherwise fully intelligible signal) in place of information to increase entropy, to counteract redundancy.”  I am curious about the author’s classification of music as self referential and sensory rather than symbolic. What does this mean? 

Furthermore, I was fascinated by Spiegel’s line of questioning on musical composition. (a) How does the process of including noise alter the product – where does the noise come from, (b) can these decisions be considered alongside composition? (c) is there such a thing as ‘spontaneous generation’? Or, (d)  is everything just a “ transformation of previously experienced material as it moves within the human perceptual and cognitive systems, informational channels in which it could well be vulnerable to the noise of our many coexistent memories and thoughts”? Albeit not directly related, this discussion makes me think of Everything is a Remix!  I am eager to explore these concepts practically as my classmates and I compose pieces & implement noise.