Despite the best efforts of would-be interdisciplinarians throughout Euclidean space and Cartesian time--from antiquity's Pythagoreans, to Leonard Meyer's Chicago cohorts of the '60s, to the acolytes sitting in on Douglas R. Hofstadter's Bloomington colloquia--music, science and knowledge, while certainly linked beyond mere coincidence or the occasional isomorphism, ultimately exist as three functionally discrete, fully autonomous endeavors.
Even way back when in the Quadrivium, music occupied her own sovereign state. Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, etc. were allowed to co-exist and intermingle, but never would they fully integrate into some homogeneous super-mixture of intellectual pursuit.
And while such a concoction would gladly dispel the last remaining vestiges of those stoopidly archaic suppositions regarding the mystical nature of music, and thus usher in a Renaissance of musical formalism not seen since Babbitt's integral serialism (RIP, BTW), it would definitely cheapen and pervert all involved parties.
I understand that analogy--as a semantic tool of evaluation--is perhaps the best method of explaining concepts or conceits that would otherwise be foreign in their native tongue. (After all, much to my chagrin, it did serve the Nazarene rather well.)
Be that as it may, though, some part of paradise is indeed lost when one entity is expressed in the jargon of another--no matter how polyglot the messenger. Like reading Lorca in translation or not taking the repeats in Mozart, the full aesthetic effect of either--the Spanish or the English, the observed, or not, repeat--will be significantly diminished.
Moreover, esoteric trans-disciplinary vagueries such as mapping the diatonic C pitch set to the four nitrogenous DNA bases (in a one-to-one isomorphism, of course) are of little pragmatic, much less artistic merit to either music or science.
[N.B. This union would have to be fudged anyways, because the letter T--as in "thymine"--doesn't exist in chromatic pitch space even. The best you could hope to do: Borrow the leading tone "ti" from pedagogical solfège and just force the thing into submission!]
Like your Friday Wordoku, sure, it's a cute and clever way to pass the time. And indeed, as Hofstadter not-so-succinctly states in Gödel, Escher, Bach (to wit, post-Chapter XIII "padding"), a certain degree of intelligent thought was required to ascertain that a one-to-one congruence was extant in the first place.
Nevertheless, all the apparent isomorphism does--besides illustrate that, with enough semiotic crunching, stack-popping and liberal arts liberté, all things are isomorphically possible through Doug which strengthens me (GEB 20:709)--is create crappy music and grossly misrepresent the complexity and nuance of the human genome.
Confined to the combinatorial sonorities of a cheeky-sounding minor-seventh chord à la Nuggets, what else would one expect?
Despite the dissension I still harbor towards some of his GEB conjectures, I still commend Doug Hofstadter on a job very well done. (Not that he needs my kind of affirmation, or anything, really; that Pulitzer should more than suffice.)
But while he unfortunately joins the misled ranks of those who've posited that the essence of creation--and perhaps even intelligence or, better yet, consciousness itself--lies within the formulae and beakers of math and empirics, Hofstadter has penned himself a scholastic berth so wide that even his most hair-brained assertions often sound moored.
GEB was first published back in 1979, and yet, some 3.5 decades later, no work by any other author in any other field has bested it in terms of breadth, uniqueness and appeal. Save for a few amendments here and there, he's remained pretty well committed to the ideas he originally set forth.
And that...that takes cajón cajones, man.
Therefore, once the Cantor dust has settled and all the louis d'or have finally been accounted for, Hofstadter's "eternal golden braid" will probably remain tightly wound for at least a little while longer--long after the novelty of interdisciplinary studies, herselves, has waned into the aether.
