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The Complexity of Songs
I should have spotted this years ago: Donald E. Knuth is a legend in the world of Computer Science. His writings, The Art of Computer Programming, should, despite being over 30 years old, be on every software engineer’s bookshelf. There are algorithms in Volume 2, Seminumerical Algorithms that helped me through university.
In 1977, he published a paper in SIGACT News entitled The Complexity of Songs (later reprinted in the Association for Computing Machinery’s main journal), in which he suggests that our predecessors invented choruses in order to reduce the spacial complexity of songs, thus making them easier to remember.
The article is available for download and is entertaining reading, especially for the hilarious schema for ‘Old MacDonald’.
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