The Nonlinear Dynamics of Flooding Events, Resistance Movements and the Blues in New Orleans

Cities and their more-than-human environments exhibit a rich set of behaviors across multiple time scales, from the immediate to the historical. Part of a city's behavior can be described as a deterministic dynamical system, i.e., patterns of behavior that in principle are predictable. The rest reflects creative endeavors that defy dynamical analysis. New Orleans is an urban societal-environmental system that exhibits an interesting set of dynamics including instabilities in the form of river and hurricane storm-surge-induced floods. A deterministic dynamical model that couples flooding behaviors, economic development, and politically-directed efforts to protect against flooding indicates that equality and stability of the city are linked via the mechanism of societal dissipation (analogous to energy dissipation in physics where coherent motion at the macroscopic scale is transformed into stochastic motion of molecules, as in frictional heating). But New Orleans is much more than its economy, political system and flooding. The city is characterized by a long history of resistance, known as the Blues resistance tradition, and the music that came out of those resistance spaces, Blues and Jazz. To what extent can these behaviors be described using deterministic dynamics? Here I introduce a new method that extends nonlinear time series forecasting to explore this question for jazz piano music from the New Orleans jazz tradition and compare it to contemporaneous piano music from the classical tradition.