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Fibs - Fibonacci-based Poetry
Gregory K. writes "April is National Poetry Month (and, it turns out, Math Awareness Month), and on my blog, I decided to get people writing poetry based on the Fibonacci sequence. The poems are six lines, 20 syllables long with the syllable pattern 1/1/2/3/5/8, though they can go longer, obviously. I've been calling 'em Fibs, and people have been writing them on pop culture, politics, math, and more."
First
Post!
I bet
nobody
can beat me to it
with a Fibonacci poem!
Not to take away from this poster's message, but this has been done elsewhere as well. The lyrics to Tool's song "Lateralus" are written in Fibonacci rhythm (I think up to 13).
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Yeah.
Right.
Breaking
A sentence
Into syllables
Does not a poem make - how pointless
(lets try that again, w/out HTML formatting hehe)
I
thought
Slashdot
Readers had
More important things
To write about; but I was wrong.
aich
tee
tee pee
colon slash slash
slash dot dot org poem
I
Wait
For The
Beowulf Hot
Natalie Grits Goatse
Signal Eleven Penis Bird
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Math,
Makes,
My head,
Quake with pain.
Writing a poem based
On Fibonacci does the same.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Damn!
This
Will be
Tough for the
Mods, if they count all
the syllables in every post!
Did
You
Know That
The Sequence
Originally
Described The Humping Of Rabbits?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
deb
i
compiz
wtf
compile mother bitch
and something about the seasons
no, wait, i am probably thinking about haiku
damn this package! it has me all confused to the point that i can't even write a poem.
Well
I
For One
Will Welcome
(It's Mandatory)
Our Fibonacci Overlords!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
If you are going to laugh at the article just because some rock band did something similar six years ago, then by your own standards Tool would have to be a laughingstock as well. Composers of art music have been using the Fibonacci sequence for decades. Bartok back in the 1930s and 1940s, Iannis Xenakis in the 1950s, Per Norgard in the 1970s, Sofia Gubaidulina in the 1980s. What took Tool so long?
"What took Tool so long?"
Being born?
Tool's music is mind-numbingly simplistic compared to the art music composers who have used the Fibonacci sequence in their work (Gubaidulina, Xenakis, Bartok, Norgard, etc.). Tool's music sticks to rock rhythms and chord structures, doesn't use all twelve tones of the chromatic scale as has been encouraged since Schoenberg, and uses the same limited instrumentation as most rock (Carey's versatile drum kit doesn't compensate for the same-old same-oldness of the rest of the band).
If
you
restrict
your options,
you may be surprised.
You might become more creative.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Stoppit! This isn't Digg!!!!!!
But yeah, personal blog self-promotion - uber lame.
-Jar
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
01 It
01 is
02 really
03 not taxing
05 to create a Fib,
08 but still they are interesting
13 sequences of numbers. We are familiar with
21 the 'rabbit generation' origins of the sequence, but it can also describe
34 the number of petals on a flower, or the number of curves on a sunflower head, on a pineapple, or even on a pinecone.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
"doesn't use all twelve tones of the chromatic scale as has been encouraged since Schoenberg"
But on the other hand, I actually enjoy listening to Tool.
Tool's music sticks to rock rhythms
Actually, that's not entirely accurate... I really don't like Tool much at all, but one thing I found unique about them was that a lot of their songs don't use the traditional 4/4 (drumBASSdrumBASSdrumBASS) type rhythm. Don't they have some tunes in 9/8?
Considering just about every rock song that comes out anymore sounds exactly like every other, a break from the 4/4 rock beat is noteworthy. Of course, all of my exposure to Tool at all comes from years ago...
Cheap
Drugs
Call Now
We're Waiting
Do Not Hesitate
Lincoln Building Tether Pineapple Goat
God,
all!
It's fib,
version A.
Edit idea...
No! Is rev B, if still a dog.
Must...
stop...
fibbing!
Got to get...
back to my haikus!
So many syllables... wasted!
Forget your missing five tones.
There is only one rule about music, and it's a subjective rule. That rule is that the music must sound good.
If people find Tool sounds good, then it is good (to them at least) regardless of whether music snobs are whining that it is missing five tones. Part of music is not necessarily being too much. For example, many people love blues yet much of it only uses three chords and a pentatonic scale. It doesn't make it anything less - to those who love that kind of music, it obeys the only rule - it sounds good - regardless of what classically educated music snobs think.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Bush
said
that the
weapons of
mass distruction in
Iraq posed an imminent threat.
No, the only rule about music is that it must be complex, not that it has to sound good or bad. I'll repeat Xenakis' statement from Musiques formelles:
I copied the following directly from this website which has an interesting analysis of tool's lateralus album.
There's a Fibonacci in Maynard's lyrics, specifically the syllables:
black [1]
then [1]
white are [2]
all I see [3]
in my infancy [5]
red and yellow then came to be [8]
reaching out to me [5]
lets me see [3]
there is [2]
so [1]
much [1]
more and [2]
beckons me [3]
to look through to these [5]
infinite possibilities [8]
as below so above and beyond I imagine [13]
drawn outside the lines of reason [8]
push the envelope [5]
watch it bend [3]
I suppose it's not actually a true Fibonacci, since it does reverse itself.
Ugh.
Rules.
Structure.
Makes me wince.
Perhaps I should try...
Running around naked with my hair on fire screaming, "ANARCHY! ANARCHY! Take that Fibonacci, you wiper of other peoples bottoms! go away and I shall taunt you no more!"
try:
....foo
except:
....print "Display"
....print "Fibonacci"
....count = prevcount = 1
....while prevcount <= 7000:
........print prevcount ; count, prevcount = count + prevcount, count
The way *I* read the program (pronouncing each special character except for the quotes and colons), it's a fib. AND it does something useful. It displays the first twenty Fibonacci numbers!
Pronounced:
(1) try
(1) foo
(2) ex cept
(3) print dis play
(5) print fib on ac ci
(8) count e quals prev count e quals one
(13) while prev count less than or e qual to sev en thou sand
(21) print prev count sem i col on count com ma prev count e quals count plus prev count com ma count
Now that's *real* nerdy. Geeks should be proud.
If you read this alound (or at least subvocalize), you'll see a patern, and patterns in my opinion are quintessentially mathematical:
What makes this pattern interesting is not what it is, but what it is not. It's like you can hear a quantum entanglement with the poem it is not, but easily might have been. A lesser poet would have written: "TIGer, TIGer, BURNing BRIGHTly", which would be a metrical form called "trochaic quadrameter". A trochee is a two syllbale unit (or "foot") with stress on the first syllable (like this: dah DUM), as opposed to an iamb which stressed the second (va VOOM).
Hiwawatha is an example of trochaic quadrameter:
Four footed forms are very solid and predictable, but are seldom chosen by profesional poets because they quickly become monotonous and susceptible to parody, as in this excerpt of a Geroge Strong's lampoon of Hiawatha:
Tiger's unusual and broken meter gives it a haunting feeling (haunted by the missing syllables?) that fits its subject perfectly.
Getting to the subject of the article, efforts like this are often successful at getting people who are interested in poetry to try their hands at it. I think in part because it's so easy to be write bad poetry, it's helpful to have the safety net of a highy arbitrary form to fall back on: after all, what can you expect given the restrictions? The 5-7-5 structure of Haiku is also popular for the same purposes and reasons.
I wonder whether a similar effort could be made using patterns in scansion, like in "Tiger". Maybe you could create a set of rules encoding messages in stress and rhyme, and then set out a task to "encrypt" a message as verse.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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Eight and five will make eleven.
Really?
One.
One.
Then Two.
Three is next.
Five, of course, comes next.
Then Eight. It's getting hard to do.
Next is 1D. We're counting in Hex - this is slashdot!
Gotta love the surprise ending!
html formatting bug..
In soviet Russia
fibs poems
always
write
you!
\u262D = \u5350
We
Get
Signal
All your base
Are belong to us
Somebody set up us the bomb.
Po-
et-
ry real-
ly should nev-
er be written ex-
clusively by geeks on a for-
um such as slashdot. They tend to really sound horrib-
Here's a fib that starts with zero:
Deutsch
through
Balkans
Germany
UKandUS
WWIcrap
That one was really tough to have it make any sense.