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Music, Mathematics and Language: Chronicles from the Oumupo Sandbox

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Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences

Abstract

What is music… if not, at the end of the day, an accessible, fun and expressive way to engage with mathematics and language? Oumupo (Ouvroir de Musique Potentielle, a Workshop for Potential Music) is a group where musicians and theorists can explore this open question through different exercises and experiments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.graner.net/nicolas/OULIPO/listeoulipo.html

  2. 2.

    Some of these examples have been presented in the French popular science magazine Maths Langages Express, intended for a large public audience (CIJM 2017).

  3. 3.

    Oulipo has had three consecutive manifestos, the first two of which are included in a 1973 book signed collectively (Oulipo 1973); the third one was drafted during the 1970s but only published much more recently, nearly half a century after the group’s foundation (Oulipo 2009).

  4. 4.

    This base was first described by George Bergman at a very young age: he was fourteen when his paper was published (Bergman 1957), but is said to have written it two years earlier.

  5. 5.

    A comprehensive list of Euler’s work may be found on the Euler Archive’s website; see bibliography.

  6. 6.

    Some of our theoretical work and musical examples may be found on Oumupo’s website, mostly in French: http://oumupo.org.

References

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Acknowledgements

Our most sincere thanks go to Oumupo member Mike Solomon for translating an early draft of this paper, as well as to Oumupo contributor Gilles Esposito-Farese, who also happens to be a long-time, valuable member of the Oulipo mailing list.

All musical examples were typeset using GNU LilyPond (http://lilypond.org), an integral tool in many of our experiments and daily creative activities.

Like all our collective publications, a version of this article is available under a free license on Oumupo’s web site (https://urldefense.proofpoint.com).

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Correspondence to Moreno Andreatta .

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Andreatta, M., Granger, M., Johnson, T., Villenave, V. (2018). Music, Mathematics and Language: Chronicles from the Oumupo Sandbox. In: Kapoula, Z., Volle, E., Renoult, J., Andreatta, M. (eds) Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76054-4_14

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