Hello everybody and
welcome to this complexity explore course
on music and complexity
My name is Marco Buongiorno Nardelli
and I am going to be your instructor
in this course
I am a professor
at the University of North Texas
Where I hold a joint appointment between
the Division of Composition Studies
in the College of Music
and the department of Physics
in the College of Science
My work is intrinsically interdisciplinary
and cross disciplinary between
the art and the sciences
my scientific background is on
computational condense matter physics
where I study the properties of materials
using computational techniques I develop
theories and software for doing that
and been doing this for a long time
and in music, I started study music when
I was 6 years old
so I've been working in music
basically for all my life and I was
fortunate enough that I could combine
these two passions into a single career
in this course we will explore
how music and complexity are interrelated
both on the side of
how music can be explained
using concepts of complexity science
and how complexity is used by composers
as a framework
maybe not conscious framework
but nevertheless a framework for
creating their own original compositions
we will be mostly [be] working within the
tradition of the Western classical and
and popular music
so we will not be talking about
other cultures of Music
but the concept that we be exploring
are Universal
so they can be applied to any
music tradition all over the world
music in some form appears in all
nonhuman societies
a real kind of universal trait of humanity
we have music all over the world
and examples of music that date back to
you know the neanderthals
so 40,000 years ago
we have examples of musical instruments
that were used to produce music
and sound of different forms
all cultures have some form of Music
being for enjoyment
for ritual, for societal events and so on
music is shaped on different temporal,
geographical, and societal scales
there are many different musical cultures
but there are some fundamental
kind of universal constraint
it emerges from cognitive processes
social interactions, environmental
conditions and physiological constraints
we produce sound by singing for instance
and we evolved this capacity
so we evolved the condition of music
during you know human evolution
as part of our tools of communication
sound is what we use for music
is the medium of music
and music can manifest in a vast variety
of ways I mean
we have works of art
or the coordination of collective action
if you think about dance music for instanc
it helps us coordinate with others
in a common task
we listen to music and we dance together
and this is a way of establishing
a coordination and the unity
in a group of people
and ritual of course music is part of all
religious rituals that we can think of
but the most important aspect of this
and the one that fascinates me most
is the concept of music as emergence
music emerges from interaction among
multiple elements
and these elements can be like the single
tone frequencies, like sign tones
to the combination of of this single tone
into pitches like the notes that produced
when you play an instrument
or when you sing
but also from the combination of all the
pitches into melodic lines
you know the single song that is emerges
from the the combination of all these
units
and then the combination of melodic lines
into harmonic constructs
where multiple nodes are played together
and you can build this emergence
through the interaction of different
elements and bring it
to the scale of you know human interaction
the individual performance
of a piece of music
is an emergence of
produced by the interaction
among the performers
the effect that music has on individuals
and groups
we all have experienced
emotions that are driven by listening
to music
and as I was saying before
we all dance together
to a music and created this coordination
in the group and then we can go to
higher level, dimensions like
the study of song corpora
so we have collection of songs
and there are many examples of this kind
in the last decade
and then eventually to understand music
and music evolution within cultural
evolution framework
so to see how music evolves and changes
over time due to this interactions
and societal constraints
the music develops within