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