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Books-Livres 205 as too one-sided, but this is the fun of dealing with a field of sciencethat is rapidly developing and where many questions still are controversial. In any case, Gregory adds a large bibliography where the reader may find the original papers, which he can study and thereby reach his own conclus;ons. Professor Gregory in this valuable account of a difficult subject has shown with great skill that the study of the eye (which is truly an extension of the brain) may one day help to explain ourselves. Gerald Oster, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, Brooklyn, N. Y., U.S.A. Information Theory and Aesthetic Perception. Abraham Moles, (Trans. from French by J. E. Cohen) Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1965. 215 pp., $7.50. This book, originally published in France in 1958, is a pioneering work that is likely to become a classic in this field. In it, Professor Moles outlines a point of view about aesthetics, a proposed experimental programme and a number of more limited, areas in which fruitful experiments have already been carried out. The main exemplars stem from the art of music, but the book should be read by anybody concerned with a cybernetic approach to the arts; by practising artists, who are anxious to analyse their work in these terms; and certainly by composers (especially, perhaps, those engaged in the synthesis of electronic music). To a significant but lesser extent, it is of interest to perceptual psychologists. The book is lucid and, on the whole, non-technical (where technical jargon is introduced, it is preceded by adequate descriptive passages). Chapter I gives a succinct account of certain relevant aspects of information theory. It deals with such fundamental notions as symbols, languages and codes, and the concept of a communication channel involving a transmitter and a receiver (identified with a human being). The presuppositions underlying information theory are considered at some length, and a method is developed for applying this theory to real life situations that involve aesthetic perception. The chapter also contains a preliminary discussion of the statistical measures of ‘selectiveinformation’and ‘redundancy’ and the relation they bear to largely intuitive quantities like ‘degree of unexpectedness’, ‘originality ’ and amount of meaning. Chapters I1 and Chapter 111aredevoted to human perceptual psychology. (The perceptual process being ‘ viewed within an information theoretic framework). Professor Moles examines the way in which man selects and abstracts form from his sensory input (a picture, a musical sequence, a written text); the relation between the physical structure of a message and the form perceived to reside in it; how the abstractive process depends upon psychological and physiological limitations and the existenceof a memory systemin the receiver. Due to these circumstances, man perceives in a necessarily discontinuous and quantized fashion. Hence, the author pays particular attention to temporal form and its correlate in the periodicity of an input sequence. Having established the backbone of a perceptual mechanism, the author goes on to consider the effect of ‘noise’ (in the technical sense of a message component to which the receiver is sensitive but which is not intended for his reception). Meaningful messages are invariably embedded in a background of ‘noise’, they have the property of standing out as ‘figures’ against this background, and they are actively selectedfrom it by the receiver’sperception. Each of these points is detailed, and there is an interesting discussion of the effect of redundancy ‘and repetition upon the way a receiver handles the ‘noise’ in his environment, or in his own data processing equipment. Using this material, the receiver’s limitations are restated in a more realistic fashion in terms of ‘uncertainty principles’; and the receiver’s memory is elaborated into an hierarchical mechanism, the several parts of which are responsible for different aspects of perception. Chapter IV starts a new theme, namely the information theoretic representation of musical sequencesin a fashion compatible with the receiver’s characteristics (outlined in the previous part of the book). Musical theory is not very helpful in this respect, and Professor Moles develops a novel framework in which there exist basic symbols (configurations in the co-ordinate’s frequency, intensity and time) somewhat analogous to the phonemes of spoken...

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