The mathematical anomaly called the Pythagorean Comma is not a typical topic for podcasts. In fact, it's not a common topic for any medium, aside from the academic paper written for an audience of music theory intelligentsia. So of course I thought Between the Liner Notes was being unique when we covered the Pythagorean Comma in episode 2: The Tuning Wars. To my shock (but not chagrin), on September 1st, the very same day episode 2 was released, I saw this tweet from @e_antczak:
Curiosity firmly piqued, I began investigating and discovered that The Black Tapes podcast, a serialized mystery docudrama, had written the Pythagorean Comma into episode 109: Name that Tune, which was also released on September 1st. The Black Tapes used the Pythagorean Comma and the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to dissonance as the engine driving episode 109's mystery. Imagine if a music theory nerd wrote the Da Vinci Code and you would get something like this Black Tapes episode.
I can understand why @e_antczak thought the two podcasts were colluding and planned this beforehand, but we were not. Neither of us was aware of the other existed let alone aware of our respective next episodes. After @e_antczak's tweet went out, The Black Tapes responded:
and then...
After finishing listening to Black Tapes ep 109 I responded:
The odds that two podcasts would release episodes about the Pythagorean Comma on the exact same day are slim but the universe works in unpredictable ways. It's like the Pythagorean Comma was already sounding in the ether, waiting for a few people to catch the sympathetic vibrations.
...and thanks @e_antczak for pointing the coincidence out to us who pretty much summed everything up with this tweet:
By Matthew Billy (BetweentheLinerNotes.com)