I hinted at this already, but I think music (and art in general) has a remarkable power to convey a large amount of information, either through personalized or cultural context. I find this narrative compression of music fascinating, because of how powerful and ubiquitous yet simple it is.

What sparked it all for me was a Moby concert I went to recently. One of the songs he played was the first song he ever performed in public. The song was decent, but what I was thinking when I heard it was “what is Moby thinking of right now? What is he feeling? What is he going through?” To his fans, it was an enjoyable piece, perhaps an important one because it was such an early one. But to him, it probably brought back the memories of years leading up to the performance, spent being defeated by music, having to play music, not wanting to play music, wanting to play music, liking to play music, experimenting with music, making music; the feelings of anxiety and excitement that mixed with sweat on the night of the performance; and the subsequent career that unfolded slowly, gradually. This song may have compressed his entire career to Moby. This is much more than one can ever express in words.

To be fair, other sources of information, such as words, can be incredibly powerful as well. Some quintessential examples of this are works by Karl Marx and many ancient philosophers. In fact, the former altered the fabric of the human world for almost a century–that’s an unparalleled feat!

What’s fascinating about this narrative compression is that music (and other media) have the bandwidth to fit everyone’s narrative. Good Vibrations may (and probably do) mean to me something totally different from what they it means to you. It’s incredible that three and a half minutes of (even low quality) audio can contain so much context.

In fact, an interesting idea would be to try to compare actual information content of various media and their perceived information content (as perceived by all humans, from a variety of perspectives). It’s of course impossible to gauge how much context fits in a song (especially that while a song may mean a lot of things for many people, it only has complex meaning to relatively few people; also, of course, without the memory of the actual events, music is not that useful), but there again, that’s what thought experiments are for…

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