META Meta ⌿ Hodos

James Tenney introduces a number of propositions, along with corresponding definitions and comments, concerning perceptual organization, musical parameters, formal perception and description, and entropy as a measure of variation. Among these propositions are: temporal gestalt-units (TGs) are formed at several different hierarchical levels during the process of musical perception; the perceptual formation of TGs at any hierarchical level is determined by a number of factors of cohesion and segregation, the most important of which are proximity and similarity; pitch, timbre, and (musical) time are not simply one-dimensional parameters, because each includes at least two relatively independent “subparameters”; the perception of form at any hierarchical level involves the apprehension of three distinct aspects of form at that and all lower levels—state, shape, and structure; the statistical entropy of an ergodic TG is zero.