It's not only an analogy.

In an attempt to answer age-old questions about how basic musical elements work together, Dmitri Tymoczko has journeyed far into the land of topology and non-Euclidean geometry, and has returned with a new -- and comparatively simple -- way of understanding how music is constructed. His findings have resulted in the first paper on music theory that the journal Science has printed in its 127-year history, and may provide an additional theoretical tool for composers searching for that elusive next chord.

"I'm not trying to tell people what style of music sounds good, or which composers to prefer," said Tymoczko (pronounced tim-OSS-ko), a composer and music theorist who is an assistant professor of music at Princeton. "What I hope to do is provide a new way to represent the space of musical possibilities. If you like a particular chord, or group of notes, then I can show you how to find other, similar chords and link them together to form attractive melodies. These two principles -- using attractive chords, and connecting their notes to form melodies -- have been central to Western musical thought for almost a thousand years." . . .

To bring these ideas to life, Tymoczko has created a short movie that illustrates the chord movement in a piece of music by 19th-century composer Frederick Chopin. His E minor piano prelude (Opus 28, No. 4) has charmed listeners since the 1830s, but its harmonies have not been well explained.

"This prelude is mysterious," Tymoczko said. "While it uses traditional harmonies, they are connected with nonstandard chord progressions that people have had trouble describing. However, when you plot the chord movement in geometric space, you can see Chopin is moving along very short lines, staying primarily within one region."

The movie is available at http://www.princeton.edu/pr/media/chopin/chopin3_350k.mov

Tymoczko said that the geometric approach could assist with our still-murky understanding of music ranging from the mid-1800s through the contemporary period, including the cluster-based compositions of Georgi Ligeti, whose work formed a dramatic part of the soundtrack to the film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"What all this implies is that you can begin with any sort of harmony your ear enjoys, whether it's a familiar chord from a 300-year-old hymn or the most avant-garde cluster you can imagine," he said. "But once you have decided where to start from and what region of space your harmony inhabits, very general principles of musical coherence suggest that you stay close to that region of space."

Kind of SF all around. When the aliens finally arive we can sing math to them so that they know that we are not as dumb as we look. And act.