A few days ago I wrote about Nelson’s ideas on hypermedia, and I was anxious to see how these ideas have been absorbed in the musical world, and how people have been thinking about hypermusic. Surprisingly, I found very little written on the topic, and what I did find does not seem to relate very much to Nelson’s ideas of hypermedia. As mentioned previously, one paper I did find was by composer John Maxwell Hobbs and his descriptions of Web Phases a composition for the Internet....
The ideas of nonlinear thinking and writing has developed quickly with the growth of the Internet, but dates back much longer. An encyclopedia or dictionary can for example be considered an example of nonlinear writing, with links and internal references. However, it is quite common to acknowledge the “Garden of forking paths” by Jorge Louis Borges (1941) as the start of modern nonlinear thinking and writing. In this short story he develops a notion of forking time encountering various diverging paths, which again lead to a number of potential futures:...