Life, storied.
“Mathemusician” Vi Hart uses a music box and a Möbius strip to explain space-time. Reminiscent of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid but the paper, scissors and tunefulness make it easier to follow.
Hat tip Brain Pickings, FastCoDesign and my dad.
Clearly, every cut-and-paste notation set will produce only one aural outcome. How would you demonstrate that this limitation holds the other way, temporally (i.e., that the relationship is symmetric, oscillating between termini guaranteed not to vary no matter which direction they’re approached from)?
Put another way: can you confidently deduce from the finished aural product exactly what notational cutting and pasting had been done to achieve it, and what the original melody was? Or is the final product compatible with more than one cut-and-paste history (i.e., could it have a different notational origin)?
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