HAY SCIENCEY PEOPLE, what do you think of this article on lossless compression as a key to understanding musical beaty?

C/P of part of the abstract:

Background
The biological origin of music, its universal appeal across human cultures and the cause of its beauty remain mysteries. For example, why is Ludwig Van Beethoven considered a musical genius but Kylie Minogue is not? Possible answers to these questions will be framed in the context of Information Theory.
Presentation of the Hypothesis
The entire life-long sensory data stream of a human is enormous. The adaptive solution to this problem of scale is information compression, thought to have evolved to better handle, interpret and store sensory data. In modern humans highly sophisticated information compression is clearly manifest in philosophical, mathematical and scientific insights. For example, the Laws of Physics explain apparently complex observations with simple rules. Deep cognitive insights are reported as intrinsically satisfying, implying that at some point in evolution, the practice of successful information compression became linked to the physiological reward system. I hypothesise that the establishment of this "compression and pleasure" connection paved the way for musical appreciation, which subsequently became free (perhaps even inevitable) to emerge once audio compression had become intrinsically pleasurable in its own right.
Testing the Hypothesis
For a range of compositions, empirically determine the relationship between the listener's pleasure and "lossless" audio compression. I hypothesise that enduring musical masterpieces will possess an interesting objective property: despite apparent complexity, they will also exhibit high compressibility.

Free article here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3035585/

Looks like junk tbh. Clip art, dubious affiliation ("CSIRO Livestock Industries"), the only quantitative data are cherry-picked off the Internet, ridiculous statements like "My personal perception is that Beethoven's 3rd Symphony sounds more sophisticated (complex?) than ELBeano's Ventilator trance techno, and yet it actually compresses more strongly.", no distinction between recording and composition...

scik mouthy to thread

So, graphically, the theory is saying that :) is better than http://i54.tinypic.com/souv12.gif ?

it's not serious (and i suspect it's not meant entirely seriously), but it's not junk. csiro is not a dubious affiliation fwiw.

my phd was in information theory (kinda)

can't face reading that right now

ctrl+f 'shannon' no results nagl tho

under some fixed probabilistic assumptions it is possible to measure "raw information content" of a piece of recorded music and then compare that with peoples perception upon hearing that recording.

i am definitely interested in the role of 'information theory' w.r.t evolution. for instance somehow you would have expected our languages to evolve in such a way to maximise information content (e.g. conveying a much information in as few words/syllables as possible) but afaik that doesn't really seem to be the case. i'm pretty sure people have studied this extensively though and i don't know much about it. v interesting though.

for instance somehow you would have expected our languages to evolve in such a way to maximise information content

you would? i wouldn't.

it's not serious (and i suspect it's not meant entirely seriously), but it's not junk.

no, it's junk.

it's an interesting premise, but it falls apart under any sort of scrutiny.