Newsgroups: bit.listserv.literary
Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 14:19:47 EDT
From:         Tim Johnson <PH408014@BROWNVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: science metaphors

  Jeremy Campbell, _Grammatical Man_
  Paul Davies,  _[can't remember the title.  something about order]_

  The extensions of Campbell's discussions to music
and literature is my own.

  As far as what it will allow you to predict...  Probably
nothing.  However, much of contemporary music ("classical"
not pop) is involved in investigating new forms and new
sounds, and pushing the frontiers of what we consider
to be music.

  The best definition that has been given of music is, IMHO,
"organized sounds."  (I paraphrase some famous composers quote.
And worse still, I forget the attribution.)  The "organized"
is the key.  In other words, I reject the notion that randomly
sequenced sounds are music.  On the other hand, I allow that
water, dripping from a roof into tin pails below could be music.
The organization is due to the constraints - it both limits
the patterns available and provides structure to the composition.

  While, again, this is not the list to go into this in
detail - this application of information theory to music
can, I think, inform discussions of what music is, of what
changing the rules, or bending the rules, or modifying the
rules of music does.  It does not, I suspect, inform discussions
on pure aesthetics of music - though I may well be wrong.

  In literature, the connection seems more tenuous, only because
it is much harder to throw out all the rules and all the constraints
when writing a book.  On the other hand, I suspect it may be at
least somewhat relevant for poetry which pushes the boundaries.
I'm just not sufficiently well ...(wait for it)... versed in poetry
to be able to comment on that.  As long as novels continue to be
written in a language, they will be stuck with lots of rules.

  Consider Borges library.  Each book in the library is a random
collection of letters.  Somewhere in his infinite library is any
given book that one can imagine.  And, as he notes, different
people speaking different languages will find different texts
to be interesting.  This is in some sense the obverse of the
problem - applying constraints to generated texts, although
it is simple enough to imagine that the constraints were applied
before the texts were generated.  Anyhow, when you put rules to
the texts, you are able to extract meaning from them.  (Not all
of them, of course, many are discarded as gibberish.)

  Consider also the family of programs in which you feed
in a text, and it spits out a randomly generated text.  Depending
upon the desires of the person running the program, and the
capacity of the machine, it chooses a letter with probabilities
weighted by some number of the immediately preceding letters.
If you weight the generation by just one letter, the result is
meaningless.  If you weight it by ten thousand letters, you get
the same (up to ten thousand letters) text you input.  Somewhere
in between you start generating text in which you can recognize
meaningful sentences which aren't merely duplicates of what the
machine has been fed.  (The same operation can be done choosing
words rather than letters.  I think you get the point.)

  Perhaps also in this notion lies the solution for the post-modernist
critics.  While it is easy to accept that for texts there is no single
privileged interpretation, it is much less obvious that *all* interpretations
are equally valid.  Some are, as they say, more valid than others.
The interpretation of a text - or, if you would, the *allowable, valid*
interpretations of a text are dependent upon the rules which are applied
to the text.  The more constraints which are applied (say, for example,
a prescriptive dictionary) the fewer the valid interpretations.  It is
not unthinkable to imagine discussing the entropy of a text under certain
conditions.

  Anyhow, it isn't really my field, but I think there are opportunities
there to make meaningful statements about literature and music based
upon information theory (based, ultimately, on entropy and statistical
mechanics).

                     -Tim
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