One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows centuries of work to find the rules that structure language, music, and society. How strictly analogous are the patterns governing a symphony and those that describe a social transformation? Math and music are old friends, but new statistical and computational techniques afford the possibility of going even deeper. What fundamental insights — and what sounds — emerge by bringing physicists, composers, social scientists, data artists, and biologists together?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week on Complexity, we sit with two of SFI’s External Professors — Miguel Fuentes at the Argentine Society for Philosophical Analysis and the Institute of Complex Systems of Valparaiso, and Marco Buongiorno Nardelli at the University of North Texas — for a discussion that roams from their working group on the complexity of music, to fundamental questions about the nature of emergence, to how we might bring all of these ideas together to think about  social transformation as a kind of music in its own right.

A show that spend so much time exploring sense and nonsense would hardly be complete without technical errors, so please accept our apologies for losing some of Miguel’s backstory to a recording glitch. For this reason, be extra sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com.

Note that applications are now open for our Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships! If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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Referenced in this episode:

An ‘integrated mess of music lovers in science’
on the 2020 Music & Complexity SFI Working Group
(with YouTube playlist of talks)

Expanding our understanding of musical complexity
on the 2022 Music & Complexity SFI Working Group

Topology of Networks in Generalized Musical Spaces
by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli

Tonal harmony and the topology of dynamical score networks
by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli

a computer-aided data-driven composition environment for the sonification and dramatization of scientific data streams
by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli

Machines that listen: towards a machine listening model based on perceptual descriptors
by Marco Buongiorno Nardelli, Mitsuko Aramaki, Sølvi Ystad, and Richard Kronland-Martinet

Does network complexity help organize Babel’s library?
by Juan Pablo Cárdenas Iván González, Gerardo Vidal, and Miguel Fuentes

Complexity and the Emergence of Physical Properties
by Miguel Fuentes

The Structure of Online Information Behind Social Crises
by Juan Pablo Cárdenas, Gastón Olivares, Gerardo Vidal, Carolina Urbina and Miguel Fuentes

88 - Aviv Bergman on The Evolution of Robustness and Integrating The Disciplines
Complexity Podcast

86 - Dmitri Tymoczko on The Shape of Music: Mathematical Order in Western Tonality
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81 - C. Brandon Ogbunu on Epistasis & The Primacy of Context in Complex Systems
Complexity Podcast

67 - Tyler Marghetis on Breakdowns & Breakthroughs: Critical Transitions in Jazz & Mathematics
Complexity Podcast

36 - Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)
Complexity Podcast

27 - COVID-19 & Complex Time in Biology & Economics with David Krakauer (Transmission Series Ep. 2)
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Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science
by Stuart Firestein (SFI Community Lecture)

SFI’s Operating Principles
by Cormac McCarthy