A letter is a colour is a note is a byte.
The Amstrad CPC has twenty-seven colours, because it has three levels on each of three channels and 3³ is 27. Twenty-six letters and a space is 27. That is a bijection, and a bijection means the two things are the same thing wearing different clothes.
Its keyboard is read through the sound chip. Its joystick is keyboard line 9. In December 1989 Codemasters shipped thirty games on an ordinary audio CD, loaded through that joystick port — so the program entered through the audio hardware. Leave the cable in and the game took the same signal as joystick input, because there is nothing in a waveform that says which it is.
So: one sequence of samples. A word, a melody, an image, a rhythm, an instrument and a program, with nothing converting between them. Type something and watch every reading of it at once.
the sequence every row below is the same integers
the readings choose which parts play · they all play the same integers
The dynamic reading holds one pitch throughout and carries the whole sequence in loudness alone. The timbre reading holds one pitch and one volume and carries it in instrument alone. Neither is a transposition of the other — they are the same integers, read differently. Mute one and the rest are byte-identical.
as an image 27 colours is the palette and the alphabet
as a wire the round trip through an actual waveform
Open the wire panel and add noise. The text is turned into an actual waveform at 8 kHz and recovered by measuring it — a Goertzel filter asks each of the twenty-seven candidate tones how much of itself it hears. It stays intact at four times the signal amplitude and breaks at eight.