Design Patterns / Jazz Standards

January 25, 2012 12:04 PM

Hello MeFi. I'm curious as to the correlation between software development Design Patterns for and Jazz Standards. Usual loot from Google: Some dude who thought of it first (and used it as a nice allegoric explanation in Programmers Stackexchange and a somewhat geeky ironic coding-related mention ("Jazz supports interaction through event listeners"). These are all nice examples of the basic similarity between the two, I'm looking for more, though. Are you aware of any materials that somehow approach this idea?
posted by lipsum to Society & Culture (2 answers total)

I don't have any specific references, but there is a research project called Improvisation, community, and social practice that may have some useful references. "The international Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project explores musical improvisation as a model for social change."

They have a conference coming up called CFP: Ethics and the Improvising Business. Kind of tangential but maybe it will help.

There are a lot more ways in which that allegory can be explored, especially since jazz improvisation is largely the combination and reconfiguration of small musical chunks in order to navigate a pre-configured framework. I'm curious to see where this goes.
posted by ianhattwick at 6:21 PM on January 25, 2012 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You might have more luck going back to Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language work that inspired the software design patterns and looking for links from that to Jazz.
posted by crocomancer at 3:12 AM on January 26, 2012 [1 favorite]