Musical notation for a loop

From pioneering artist/designer Bruno Munari's Discovery of the Circle (1965). Munari's children's books Zoo and ABC are also classics of design, illustration, and whimsy. (via The Art of Memory)

• [Tribune]

  So this is how I describe the circle of hell my children occasionally condemn me to with looped music.

  • [OldBrownSquirrel]

    I’m very lucky that the song my 5yo son has been listening to on repeat (Cloisonné by They Might Be Giants) is from an album (Join Us) I bought for myself and spent some time listening to on repeat.

  • [SoItBegins]

     This is the song that never ends
    it just goes on and on, my friends…

• [Steve Faiella]

  not sure I agree with the “no beginning or end”.  Wouldn’t the G clef symbol and time signature be the beginning and the last note the end?  Yes, it’s repeated, but there are distinct beginning and ending parts of the pattern. Perhaps I’m just too old and pedantic to enjoy these types of things.. LOL

  • [nixiebunny]

     When you program it into your drum machine, the clef is silent.

• [Pope Ratzo]

  There is a much more basic and widely used notation for a loop.  It’s called a “repeat sign”. 

  If you look at the sheet music for any popular song since the late 1800′s, you’ll see lots of them, and any musician knows how to work them.

  • [SoItBegins]

    …some people started singing it not knowing what it was
    and now they’ve kept on singing it, because…

• [robcat2075]

   One of the things Bach was famous for  during  his lifetime was his “puzzle canons”, tiny loops of music that could be interpreted in various ways to render complex, yet harmonious results.  The “Hudemann Canon” is a particularly brief example:

  http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/realhud1.html

  • [SoItBegins]

    …this is the song that never ends

    it just goes on and on, my friends…

• [Paco]

  BTW LilyPond (.org) can do this: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2010-02/msg00150.html

• [Müller Jan]

  http://www.rem.ufpr.br/_REM/REMv13/03/voz_oralidade_concretude_clip_image002.jpg
  (pierre schaeffer ca. 1948)

• [Alissa Mower Clough]

  I’d put the clef in the center, of course!

• [Baldhead]

  I see either a 8th bar with 2 beats followed by a 9th with just one (in a 3/4 piece) or a needless line seperating them.  of course both a ten bar repeating pattern and an 11 bar pattern are highly abnormal, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

• [Ant]

  Like Canon in D? :P