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Can someone explain why the visualizations are triangles, if the two axis are meant to represent similarity and time?

The horizontal axis represents musical time, from the beginning to the end of the piece, while the vertical axis shows how far the similarities persist into the higher-level structure of the piece.

If I understand this correctly, this means that the vertical axis goes from "similarity in large-scale structure" at the top to "similarity at the momentary scale" at the bottom, so the triangle is a sensible way to look at it.

I think it might be easier to look at the triangle from bottom-to-top; the "higher-level structures" build upon/are made up of the lower-level structures.

Or at least that's how this musicology-phile interpreted them.

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