Re: information reduction

[Brian Whitman <bwhitman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kim: definitely check out Pierce's "Symbols, Signals & Noise" for a
user-level IT standpoint on all of this. While not precisely "information
reduction", a large chunk of information theory deals with getting at the
most information rich chunks out of a stream of media-- reduction then
would be a recomposition of this stream. I'm not sure if you're at the
actual sound level or working with notes, but either way: the process
invovles finding the smallest chunks that have similar entropy and
normalizing them. For sounds/digital audio, do some carefully planned
filters-- for notes, you've got your work cut out for you: Leonard Meyer's
"Music, the Arts and Ideas," and maybe Keykit to help you do the math :)
It would be nice if I could point you to someone doing similar work...
but... if you read the Pierce book you can get a taste of how annoyed
these EE types are with IT being used for the arts, even back in the early
60s. I've only had time to do toy problems on a palm pilot with all this,
but if you are interested with the concepts, do get in touch.

my introduction: my name is brian, I do NLP work @ columbia currently.. I
also make sounds as "blitter." pleased to meet you all.


Brian Whitman
bwhitman@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.netspace.org/users/bwhitman

On Wed, 10 Nov 1999 kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I've been interested over the years in the reduction of information in
> various media (sound, film/video, text) and stumbled across a company
> called "SineWave Synthesis"
> reducing the amount of information in sound and how that might be used in
> constructing an axis of recognizability in my work...