Music Analysis and Data Compression

David Meredith focuses on how the musical knowledge that underpins both music perception and musical imagery can be acquired by compressing musical information. He works from the notion that the goal of music analysis is to find the best possible explanations for the structures of musical “objects,” such as individual works or movements as well as extracts from works or collections of works. In opposition to what Meredith considers to be the subjectively grounded evaluation of different analyses of the same music that is carried out by music analysts adopting a humanistic approach, he proposes that the relative quality of two analyses of the same object can be measured in terms of how well they allow us to carry out objectively evaluable tasks, such as recognizing composers or genres, or finding errors in musical data.