Colophon
Every publication that asks to be trusted should say plainly who makes it and how. This is that page.
Publisher
Foldsong is an independent publication produced in Türkiye by Burak Gökalp.
Correspondence: hello@foldsong.com
Foldsong publishes one fold every week — a crease pattern, its story, its music, and the science behind it — in seven languages.
The catalogue
Every item we publish carries a permanent catalogue number. The number never changes and is never reused. It tells you which of two collections the item belongs to.
- FSO-#### — The Folds. A pattern we designed ourselves. Generated by our own software, verified, named and dated by us.
- FSA-#### — The Atlas. A traditional or academically published pattern, curated and presented by us, with its origin credited.
- FSR-#### — a recording. FSR-A## — an album. FSP-#### — a podcast episode.
- FS-YYYY-W## — the weekly issue that ties them together.
Alongside our own numbers, recordings carry the international codes the music industry uses: ISRC for each recording, UPC for each release. These are listed on each fold's page as they are assigned.
How a fold is verified
No pattern is published until it passes the same gate:
- Kawasaki's theorem — at every interior vertex, alternating angles must each sum to 180°.
- Maekawa's theorem — mountain and valley creases must differ by exactly two.
- Rigid folding — the pattern is folded computationally from flat to fully folded. Every edge length and every facet diagonal is measured at each step. If the paper would stretch anywhere, the pattern is rejected.
A pattern that fails any of these is not published. This has already caught real errors in our own work — we correct them and say so.
What is human, what is machine
We are explicit about this because we think a reader deserves to know.
- Patterns — generated by software we wrote, then selected and named by a human.
- Music — composed from the pattern's own geometry by our software, then performed by an AI music model (ElevenLabs, trained on licensed material). A human chooses which take is published.
- Stories — written and edited by a human.
- Narration — synthetic voice.
- Translations — machine-assisted, human-reviewed.
Every music release also carries a formal AI disclosure through the industry's standard metadata channel.
Sources and corrections
Every scientific claim on this site carries its source. Where we cannot verify a claim, we do not make it — several popular origami claims are widely repeated and are not supported by evidence; we keep a list of these and avoid them.
When we get something wrong, we correct it in public and leave a record of the correction. Write to hello@foldsong.com.
Rights
Patterns in The Folds are our own designs; the software, names, stories and music are ours. Patterns in The Atlas are traditional or previously published — we present them with attribution and we do not publish any contemporary designer's model without permission.
Origami technique itself belongs to everyone. What belongs to us is the expression: the specific pattern, the name, the story, the recording.