This is true, but because Backbone made a poor naming choice. Backbone Views are what one normally thinks of as "controllers" (coordinating presentation and models), and the view/presentation layer is not handled by Backbone per se but by something like Underscore templating. Backbone Controllers really are just some helpers to deal with URL hashes.
In my experience Backbone Views become the "top level" of a client-side app, but that is appropriate because they encapsulate controller logic.
Yeah, I'm aware of that, but from my experience the code can end up uglier than it needs to be, either because you need to pass through proxying views further down the chain, or need to duplicate functionality.
I guess I just dislike the convention of interacting directly with collections from places where it shouldn't be done, e.g a todoView removing its own Todo from the collection (hence the risk of duplicating functionality throughout your code), instead of asking a proxying controller to do it. I think this is the reason as to why I've seen a lot of Backbone code where a reference in to the view is stored in the model itself (e.g http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/todos.html), which disgusts me since it completely misses the point of MVC.
Also, events passing feels more complicated than it would need to be (even if you can always include Backbone.Event).
If you start with the 12 chromatic tones and start addding notes to a scale going up a circle of fifths, there are two natural stopping points where you have spanned the octave with a complete-sounding set of notes with relatively equal spacing and no gaps: five notes, which gives whole-step and minor-third intervals; and seven notes, which gives whole-step and half-step intervals. These two scales correspond to the spacing of the black notes and the white notes, which are mirror images of each other around the circle of fifths. Any other choice of scale size would have gaps, I believe.
The drawback to this explanation is that the diatonic scale is 10,000 years older than the "circle of fifths". So it presumably had some appeal to musicians as well as to music theorists.
The MIDI samples were a really poor choice to introduce the program's compositions, but those snippets do sound a lot like Bach chorales stylistically, perhaps at the level a competent (if uninspiring) student of harmony.
The chorales exist online in machine-readable formats at http://www.jsbchorales.net/ (a great resource for doing comprehensive analysis on chorale harmony -- wouldn't doubt if the same data served as input for the Emmy program).
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2666
<Leader>r (regex) to add matches to the set of highlighted groups.