The sequence of blue words, referred to here as the "spine", was constructed first. By design, it was to be composed of unusual English words that were used in the excerpts. A given word was selected for inclusion in the spine if and only if it satisfied the following criteria:

• The word is used only once in the 235 excerpts.
• The word is not a proper noun and it is not in a proper noun phrase.
• The word is an English word.
• The word is not similar to another word that is used in one of the 235 excerpts. For this purpose the following types of words were considered to be similar: singular and plural forms of a given noun, different tenses of a given verb, and words with a common beginning, middle or ending (e.g. tables/tabulation, candid/candidate, lot/allotted, exhibits/prohibitions, accord/concord, parents/transparent, ogrelike/harpsichordlike, profits/benefits, option/adoption, resolved/unresolved, moving/nonmoving, etc.). Also, related words such as pride and proud, and depth and deep, were taken to be similar.

Mathematically speaking, the complete list of 45,900 words (minus proper nouns and non-English words) were partitioned into equivalence classes consisting of similar words. The spine consists of the classes for which there is only one member.

A 3-digit number was assigned to each spine word. To generate a number, a 10-sided die (with faces labeled 0 through 9) was rolled three times, once for each digit (from the most-significant through least-significant digit, in order). In some cases, the same number was assigned to more than one word. For such words, the 10-sided die was rolled one more time. The resulting digit was appended as a decimal digit after the word's 3-digit number. Additional decimal digits were generated and appended as needed until a unique number was assigned to each word. Then the words were sorted in numerical order.

The 641 spine words were used (in numerical order) for the blue words of the poem, with one exception. The word "graves" was removed because it is a person's last name (as it is used in the excerpt from which it was taken).

Each line of the poem is a contiguous sequence of words from one sentence of an excerpt. Any punctuation that is immediately before or after the sequence of words (in the excerpt) was included in the poem line. Also, all punctuation within the sequence of words (including unmatched quotation marks and parentheses) as well as italics was retained for use in the poem line. The number of words in a particular line was determined by adding the results of rolling a 4-sided die (with faces labeled 0 through 3)^* and an 8-sided die (with faces labeled 1 through 8). Thus, each line of the poem consists of 1 to 11 words.

The poem lines were not constructed in numerical order. The sequence of (640) lines was partitioned into 10 subsequences of 64 lines, consisting of lines 1 through 64, 65 through 128, 129 through 192, and so on. These subsequences were visited in a round-robin fashion. First, the first line of each subsequence was written: line 1, line 65, line 129, etc. Then the second line of each subsequence was written; then the third, and so on. Also, when a given line was being composed, neighboring spine words and previously determined neighboring lines were out of sight. In this way, poem lines were written with little or no knowledge of the context in which a line would exist in the poem.

In the process of selecting poem lines, it was discovered that the spine word "buy" was a typo made in transcribing an excerpt. In the original text from which the excerpt was taken, this word is "but". Because "but" is not a unique word in the excerpts, this spine word was discarded. Thus, the final version of the poem consists of 639 lines. (Note: Coincidentally, both the number of excerpts (235) and the number of poem lines (639) contain a relatively large prime factor. 235 equals 5 times 47. 639 equals 3 times 3 times 71. Also, the ratio 235:639 (roughly 0.368) is somewhat close to one minus the inverse of the golden ratio (roughly 0.382).)

In this poem, each line is followed by a blank line. Some "lines" of the poem occupy more than one physical line. These were extracted from excerpts of poems (written by composers). Their format, including line breaks, matches that of the original poem. Also, they have been centered and set in a monospaced font.

Lines that were extracted from a block quote in an excerpt have been indented and set in a small font.

The red and green words were selected through a single-person role-playing game with two characters: Red, a composer who is against the concept of mathematical music; and Green, a composer who is open to the idea. The players visited the lines of the poem in order from first to last. For each line, they painted some contiguous sequence of black words the color that matches their name. Each player sought to select words to communicate their beliefs.

To begin, Green rolled a 4-sided die (with faces labeled 1 through 4) to determine who would go first on line 1. Green was to be first for an even-valued roll. Otherwise, Red would be first. For subsequent lines, the players were to take turns being first. The roll was 1. So Red went first for the odd-numbered lines, and Green went first for the even lines.

Play proceeded in accordance with the following rules: Let F be the player that goes first on a given line L. Let S be the player that goes second. F will roll a 4-sided die (with faces labeled 0 through 3)^* to determine how many words of L will be painted the color F. If there are no black words in L, then F does not roll the die, no words are colored F or S, and play moves to the next line. Otherwise, F rolls the die repeatedly until a number M is obtained that does not exceed the length of the longest contiguous string of black words in L. Then F selects and paints a contiguous string of M words of L the color F. Next, S will roll the same 4-sided die to decide how many words of L will be colored S. If there are no more black words in L, then S does not roll the die, no words are colored S, and play moves to the next line. Otherwise, S rolls the die repeatedly until a number N is obtained that does not exceed the length of the longest contiguous string of black words in L. Then S selects and paints a contiguous string of N words of L the color S.

In the version of the game used here, the players selected their words for a given line by considering the sequence of words that they had already chosen in previous lines. In general, the sequence of words selected by the other player was ignored. Subsequent lines were ignored as well.

During the game, the numbers rolled by Red and Green were recorded. After play had proceeded through all lines of the poem, the number of words selected by each player was compared to this list of recorded numbers. Eight discrepancies were found. In seven cases, the number of selected words was different from the recorded number by one (sometimes greater, sometimes less). In one case, the difference was two. These cases were reviewed to determine if the number of selected words should be brought in line with the recorded number. In no case could the source of the error be determined. And it was not known what the correct number of selected words should be. Either the number rolled was recorded incorrectly, or the number of selected words did not match the number rolled. In one of these cases, it was decided that a change should be made. The word "exceptions" was changed from black to green.

The fourteen auxiliary notes given after the poem were arranged randomly. A table was created with two columns and seven rows. The cells were numbered from one through fourteen (from left to right, and top to bottom). A 4-digit number was assigned to each note by rolling a 10-sided die (with faces labeled 0 through 9) four times, once for each digit (from the most-significant through least-significant digit). The notes were sorted numerically and placed in order in the table. The 4-digit numbers were placed before the notes.

* Actually, a 4-sided die with faces labeled 1 through 4 was used, and the resulting face number was decremented by one to obtain a number in the range 0 through 3.