User blog comment:Vel!/Music/@comment-160.94.192.198-20140620200925/@comment-160.94.192.220-20141231173011

And there's the Leibniz quote: "Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting."

So the immediate analogy is between musical repetition and succession or recursion, I guess. We certainly have to "participate imaginatively" in these numbers, and maybe repetition enables that.

But there's an important difference, isn't there? Unlike whatever entity intercedes among mathematical objects like 5^^3 and 5^^^^3, the human soul is bad at counting. As the article seems to indicate, repetition's musicality depends upon us remembering an object while forgetting that we've seen it before. The soul gets mixed up along the way, forgets where it's at. Seems to me that repetition in music obscures quantity, obscures uniqueness and well-definition.

(With these Buddhist texts, for example, you can count the zeros, notate, and correct miscalculations, but they're only numerical constructions as much as the novice Zen monk who's told to sweep up and down while remaining blindingly mindful of every tiny gesture and event is sterilizing the monastery. The point isn't to define some end product in its exactitude. The point is that things vastly exceed the contents of one's awareness, and experience doesn't break up into equivalence classes --or something else, but rather opposite to the exploration of logic as its own process. Eventually the monk is meant to to fall apart.)