Abstract
What makes a musical work successful? In Darwinian terms, music is successful if listeners attend to it, repeatedly, for then it can live on. However, attention is fleeting: successful music holds listeners’ interest by manipulating their expectations using deception and confirmation. The ratio of the rate at which listeners follow music to the rate at which music unfolds is a predictor for musical success. This paper informally presents a theory of musical interest, based on some ideas from music theory, cognitive psychology, and information theory.
Music conveys general forms of feelings, related to specific ones as algebraic expressions are related to arithmetic [expressions].
Susanne Langer [5]
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Loy, D.G. (2017). Music, Expectation, and Information Theory. In: Pareyon, G., Pina-Romero, S., Agustín-Aquino, O., Lluis-Puebla, E. (eds) The Musical-Mathematical Mind. Computational Music Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47337-6_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47337-6_17
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