Games
- Peter Suber – Nomic: A Game of Self-AmendmentNomic
If you're interested in playing Nomic, see my project obsidian-nomic for a helpful starter-kit that can aid in tracking your game!
Nomic was invented by Peter Suber, a philosopher who wished to create an interactive way to explore the role of self-amendment in legal systems. Suber is interested in the concept of laws and rules that are able to able to modify or make statements about themselves. In this way, Nomic may be seen as being quite similar to a [[Formal System]].
Interestingly, ...
Music Of course, I view a large amount of music as following principles of constraint that seem to imply an underlying formal system. The following examples, however are particularly explicit or meaningful examples of such constraints.
- J.S. Bach
- use of imitative polyphony; self-referential contrapuntal works (canon, fugue, etc.)
- Ockeghem
- use of imitative polyphony; self-referential contrapuntal works (canon, fugue, etc.)
- The theoretical work (and music) of Sergei Taneyev: see his explorations of canonic technique and multi-part invertible counterpoint
- Berg, esp. Wozzeck for constraint rules used in constructing the form of the opera
- Webern, esp. Op. 21
- Early Minimalist music: see "Music as a Gradual Process" by Steve Reich.
- Steve Reich
- Simeon Ten Holt
- (some) Philip Glass
- Tom Johnston
- James Tenney
- Early, rigorous Spectral music (Grisey/Harvey)
- Thomas Adés (interval pairs in the Violin Concerto and fugues in In Seven Days
- Hans Abrahamsen (canonic and formal structure in Schnee)
- Andrew Norman ("interactive" rule or constraint-based orchestration in Play)
Literature
- Raymond Queneau
- stylistic/genre constraints in Exercises in Style
- Tom Philips
- erasure art and visual poetry in A Humument
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Perec, Georges Georges Perec - use of lipogram in A Void
- structural constraints in Life a User’s Manual
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Bök, Christian Christian Bök - extreme formal constraints and word games in Eunoia, The Xenotext, Crystallography
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Etherin, Anthony Anthony Etherin - highly complex use of formal constraints and word games in his poetry – see his collections, Slate Petals and Stray Arts
Mathematics
- Euclid's Elements
- The use of mathematical induction in Geometry
- Later developed into hyperbolic and spherical geometry by chaniging one axiom
- Alfred North Whitehead & Bertrand Russel: Principia Mathematica
- Kurt Gödel: Gödel's Incompleteness TheoremsGödel's Incompleteness Theorems
The Foundational Crisis of Mathematics
Disclaimer: I'm not a mathematician or historian of mathematics. This description is that of a... - Charles Babbage & Alan Turing: early computational machines
- David Hilbert's Twenty-Three Problems
General Music Theorists and Analytical Concepts
- Schenkerian Analysis
- especially for its integration of self-referential structures within the Ursatz
- Post-Tonal Analysis
- especially Serialism, Transformational Theory & Neo-Riemannian Analysis
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CAC Computer-Assisted Composition
Last modified on 01-28-2022.