Style as Information in Karnatic Music

GIFT SIROMONEY K. R. RAJAGOPALAN Music can be considered to be a communication system, and information theory has been applied to it by Youngblood *1, Coons *2 and others. Youngblood has explored the usefulness of information theory as a tool for identifying musical styles. He chose melody as stylistic aspect and compared certain works of Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. In this paper we propose to compare the works of three well known Karnatic musicians.