As an instrument designer, I read the writing of artists, musicians, inventors, film makers, and to an extent syntesthetes and psychologists, with an eye to their ideas about how music and visual art can be related to affect audiences. This way of reading is, for me, like engaging the writer in an interview in which I return repeatedly to such questions as “what kinds of expression would you like to achieve in your work?” and “what kinds of knobs would help you get there?”
Following Karl Gerstner’s lead, I organize their answers to my implicit questions as a network of working hypotheses about correspondences between the two art forms: painting (or the plastic arts more broadly) and music. These correspondences represent little more, but also nothing less, than interesting hypotheses, areas of possibility, zones of mystery to be explored.
| Hue | Purity | Form | Motion | |
| Pitch | hue to pitch | purity to pitch | size to pitch | |
| Amplitude | purity to amplitude | thickness to amplitude | ||
| Timbre Overtones | hue to timbre | |||
| Harmony | color chords & discords | purity to dissonance | ||
| Tempo Rhythm | shape to speed | action to rest | ||
| Mode | hue to mode | purity to modulation | ||
| Melody | path to melody |