In 1949, consolidating their previous efforts, Shannon and Weaver published The Mathematical Theory of Communication (i.e. Information Theory), which is, in short, a theory of measuring how effectively a message is transmitted from sender to receiver in a unit of time. Although the theory itself originates in communication engineering, it is also useful in the realm of music, especially in analysis, in twentieth-century composition, and in recent developments in aesthetics and psychology. The term "information," used in information theory, is to be understood not as used in ordinary usage, but as a technical term indicating the measured quantity of a message. Precisely speaking, the word "information" in communication theory rather refers to "the measured amount of information" or "a mathematical abstraction of information content" The notion of "entropy" was also introduced by Shannon and Weaver as a measurement of potential information contained in a message. By definition, the less predictable the communication system is (i.e. the more even the distribution of possible outcomes is), the higher entropy will be. In pitch class analysis, therefore, when the distribution is rectaguar (when all twelve pitch classes are evenly used), one can expect the maximum entropy (3.585). From 1956, many theorists have investigated musical works of various historical periods. Among them, R. Strauss' Lieder turn out to contain the most information, and nursary tunes yield the least information. In general, however, the results could be divided into several categories. That is, stylistic differences of music-historical periods in terms of the use of pitch-classes readily emerged. Although infromation theory is thus useful and even advantageous in music analysis, several questions can be raised with regard to the reliability of the data, the perceptual and cognitive validity of statistical results, and the contextual aspects of music which are totally ignored from the perspectives of statistics. Many scholars have attempted to overcome the technical and philosophical limatations and problems of information theory; as a result, recent research regarding music as a medium of communication has developed in both scope and quantity.

Ⅰ. 서론 
Ⅱ. 지각적 배경 및 가설 
Ⅲ. 의미전달 이론의 기본 개념 
Ⅳ. 음악분석에 있어서 정보이론의 활용 
Ⅴ. 정보이론의 한계와 보완법 
Ⅵ. 결론

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