studio craque 54 🏳️‍🌈Dec 1

Really great conversation today about Herbert Simon's 1962 paper "The Architecture of Complexity", thanks as always @RuthMalan for keeping us informed and updated! I could have gone on for hours probably.

This paper impressed on me because it talks about complex systems being hierarchical. And that reminds me a lot of Leonard Meyer's musical analysis methods published just six years before in 1956 - Emotion and Meaning in Music - that performs hierarchical analysis on music. Simon even mentions this in the paper, giving music as an example of hierarchical complexity. Coincidence? Maybe not, Meyer's work was well-known and influential at the time. No citation though.

Gestalt psychology is something Meyer was into and it shows a lot in Simon's thinking. The story of the watchmakers feels like a gestalt approach to complexity, one of them working faster by abstracting away the parts. Like Meyer does with his adoption of "iamb" and "trochee" for application to music, continuous abstraction pulls the lens out to the point that an entire symphony can be one large amphibrach pattern of expectation and release.

Anyway, coincidentally this recent $5 purchase arrived today!

#ComplexSystems #LeonardMeyer #HerbertSimon #Hierarchies #NearDecomposable #PapersInSystems

Noticias La InsuperableNov 4

Por qué podemos escuchar mil veces una misma canción y no aburrirnos (pero rara vez repetimos una película, una obra o un libro)

Al terminar, sabrás, seguramente, cuántas veces leerás este artículo. Por Alina C. Galifante para Noticias La Insuperable No es solo una cuestión de gustos: hay razones neurológicas, estructurales y culturales que explican por qué la música puede disfrutarse una y otra vez mientras que una película, una obra de teatro o un libro parecen agotarse después de la primera experiencia. La clave está en la expectativa, la memoria y el tipo de placer que cada arte despierta. El cerebro […]

https://noticiaslainsuperable.com.ar/2025/11/04/por-que-podemos-escuchar-mil-veces-una-misma-cancion-y-no-aburrirnos-pero-rara-vez-repetimos-una-pelicula-una-obra-o-un-libro/

studio craque 54 🏳️‍🌈Oct 20

"Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose" is an essay by Le Guin that matches up really well with Meyer's notions of rhythm and its relationship to pulse. She also makes the distinction, it is something that matters.

Which further validates my thinking about collecting accents in systems. About the way complexity forms its own pulse, a living product of its interactions.

All this led me to wonder if we are too busy alerting on how things add up, when we should be watching how things interact. That's what I am trying with Monteverdi, tilting the whole system into a different juxtaposition. Making it possible to pick any data with patterns and fit them together into a system viewfinder.

#SRE #Observability #UrsulaLeGuin #LeonardMeyer