How do we establish "better/best"?
Reply #60 – 2006-09-12 22:06:05
formats. Noise is a signal with very high entropy, because of its random nature (random frequencies at random amplitudes); if I listen to a 1 second clip of noise, and compare it to the next 1 second of noise, they will sound "the same" to me, even though the waveform of the signal could be different (different frequencies at different times, but still random). This is opposed to the actual musical signal, where there is much lower entropy (certain frequencies are played at a higher amplitude much more frequently than others, and have certain patterns in time). So, I believe that even if you were deaf from birth, and then some miracle happend that allowd you to hear for the first time, and the first things you heard was a song played on FM and the same song played on cd, your brain would detect the lower entropy of the cd recording and conclude that it prefers it over the FM signal. From my observations high frequency components of music usually are far less likely to follow a simple pattern than lower frequency components. If that means more entropy, why not apply a low pass to reduce the entropy? Would one still prefer this less entropic but also hollow signal? A high complexity is not the same as high entropy. Simply put entropy is just a measure of disorder, so one should ask if removing an ordered (although complex) pattern will really reduce the entropy of a signal. But for that, one would need a means to measure the entropy of the given signal. I think the idea is nice enough to ponder about. EDIT: Perhaps a low pass should be seen as decreasing the resolution of the audio and therefor as an increment of entropy, similarly as to why a 4 bit image has higher entropy than a 32 bit image.