Composers born after 1927 were excluded from consideration. The cutoff date was calculated by subtracting the life expectancy for the US population (which was 77.4 in 2002) from the year in which the poem was created (2005).

Excerpts on the following topics were selected:

• The ways in which the writer's musical works are related to mathematics.
• The use of mathematics in composing music.
• The relationship between music and mathematics.

In formatting the excerpts, the following conventions were used:

• The paragraph structure of the original text was preserved.
• A horizontal ellipsis was used in place of any contiguous sequence of words that were omitted from the current paragraph (including words omitted from the beginning or end of the paragraph).
• A vertical ellipsis (i.e. three dots on a vertical line) was used in place of any contiguous sequence of paragraphs that were omitted (except for paragraphs that are before the first or after the last paragraph of the excerpt).
• The case of the first letter of a word was never changed. In particular, when the beginning of a given sentence was omitted, the first letter of the word that follows the ellipsis was never changed to uppercase.
• The punctuation was never changed. In particular, when the end of a given sentence was omitted, a period was never inserted after the last word in the excerpted segment of the sentence.

Each excerpt was placed on a separate subtext page for which the file name is the letter s (for subtext), followed by the 7-digit excerpt number, followed by ".htm".

The subtext pages were sorted in numerical order. A descriptive phrase was created for each subtext page, working in order from the first to the last page. All phrases were written in lowercase. This sequence of phrases is the basis of the poem.

A prefix consisting of some type of ellipsis was placed before each phrase. To determine the prefix for a given phrase, a 10-sided die was rolled four times to generate a 4-digit number. For numbers in the interval 0000 through 6117, a 3-ellipsis (i.e. an ellipsis with three dots) was used. For numbers in the interval 6118 through 9898, a 6-ellipsis (i.e. an ellipsis with six dots) was used. For numbers in the interval 9899 through 9998, a 9-ellipsis was used. For the number 9999, the die was rolled again (four times) to generate another 4-digit number to be used instead. Also, for numbers in the intervals 3781 through 6117, 6118 through 8454, or 9899 through 9998, the first letter of the phrase (i.e. the first letter after the ellipsis) was converted from lowercase to uppercase.

Conceptually, the process of "prepending" a prefix and converting the case of the first letter may be thought of an operation on phrases. The five different operations used here may be represented symbolically as "...t", "...T", "......t", "......T" and ".........T", where T means change the case of the first letter to uppercase (and t means do not change the case).

The breakpoints in the range of possible 4-digit numbers were determined using the golden ratio, which is approximately 1.618. It was decided that the operation ".........T" should be used about one percent of the time. For the remaining 99 percent, a 3-ellipsis was to occur about 61.8 percent of the time, with 6-ellipses occurring otherwise. In addition, it was decided that a lowercase letter should follow a 3-ellipsis about 61.8 percent of the time, and an uppercase letter should follow a 6-ellipsis about 61.8 percent of the time.

For the phrases that are "<indeterminate>", the minimum (one) and maximum (eleven) number of words to be selected from the associated subtext page was determined by calculating the minimum and maximum number of words for all other phrases, excluding relatively long phrases that are questions (or statements) to which the subtext was a response.

The golden ratio was used to determine the width of the poem in relation to the total width of the display. The width of the poem (including the blue borders) is 396 pixels, which is approximately 0.618 times 640 pixels. Also, for a display width of 1024 pixels, the width of the poem is close to 0.382 (i.e. one minus 0.618) times the width of the display.

The eight auxiliary notes given after the poem were arranged randomly. A table was created with two columns and four rows. The cells were numbered from one through eight (from left to right, and top to bottom). A unique random number in the range one through eight was assigned to each note (by rolling an 8-sided die). Each numbered note was placed in the corresponding numbered cell.

It is expected that the poem might be updated in the future to incorporate additional excerpts. (The first version is based on 235 excerpts.) For example, as time progresses, the cutoff year of 1927 might be shifted forward to include the writings of younger composers. To incorporate a new excerpt, a unique 7-digit number would be generated (randomly) to determine the new subtext page name and the position of the corresponding descriptive phrase in the poem. And a 4-digit number would be generated (randomly) to determine the prefix operation to be applied to the phrase.