Already in your book “Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction” you noted the “myth of music and maths”, and recently I stumbled with an extended opinion of yours published in the “The Independent”.

My question is: does the fact that there exists a branch of Mathematics dealing with the abstract (and some concrete) aspects of music alters in some way your perceptions about the issue?

Of course, it seems perfectly reasonable if other mathematicians will study separately this problem on their owns in a more conventional matter.

One advantage of having such an open research is that it makes it easier for the community to understand the issues, ideas and proofs.

There is a famous example of Ian Agol who openly studied and eventually proved over his blog the famous tameness conjecture. Proofs of the conjecture were reached also by Suhyoung Choi who had a different approach and used some ingredients of Agol’s open ongoing work to complete it, and by Dan Calegari and David Gabai who independently worked on the conjecture and solved it.
(I hope I tell the story right.)

I get the impression that the way of working for this project may be a bit different from how it has been with previous projects. Somehow a rapid throwing out of half-formed ideas seems a bit less helpful: we all have a fairly clear idea of the kind of thing we are trying to do, and the difficulties involve getting to grips with some issues that may be technical and may be more fundamental. It could be that the right way to proceed is for people to do a bit more private thinking, and to write as much expository material as we can, with the aim of all helping each other to understand the two key papers and the other techniques that are around.

A survey paper sounds like a nice idea, and thinking about it might wake some new ideas as well.