»In which we rock out to math

Math and music, but not math rock: "Guthrie's daughter Nora eventually figured out that the [mess of wires] wasn't a bomb, but rather a recording of her father on a device that predated magnetic tape. After a year of searching, she managed to track down someone with the equipment to play it."

"Fortunately, math can help. Howarth had developed algorithms to correct these recordings. He looks for extraneous sounds, like an air conditioner or fan in the background that creates a rhythmic sound. Instead of simply removing these sounds, he uses them as a clock, a kind of built-in foot-beat in the recording that tells him what the true timing should be. When a recording is made, this background rhythm is even. But when it's played back, it speeds up and slows down in perfect timing with the errors in the recording. That allows Howarth to adjust the timing of the recording to make it much more similar to the original sound."