Len Fehskens wrote:

>If you want to analogize painting in music, then you have to delineate
>the spaces that they work within.  Music works in time, pitch, and timbre.
>Painting works in space, color and texture.  Both involve structures and
>relationships within and across these dimensions.  I suspect the more
>fruitful analogies are with respect to these structures and relationships
>rather than the dimensions, and the roles they play in expression.

And it was probably with those other sorts of analogies that this kind
of discussion began.  In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, music was
part of the quadrivium (along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy)
which, combined with the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) constituted
the program of liberal studies practiced in the universities.  Painting,
however, was considered nothing more than a craft.  In the Renaissance
the discovery (or invention, if you prefer) of perspective conferred a
new rationality to painting.  As a system of proportion--a quantitative
method of relating the parts of a painting to one another and to the
whole--perspective rendered painting a similar kind of thing to music
in that both were imitations, true re-presentations, of the principles
(mathematical) of nature.  Music probably remained superior to painting
because it was less abstract.

In the 19th century, I believe, theoreticians tried to work out those basic
"line equals melody" sorts of identities, but it didn't get very far.  Of
course, these writers were not concerned with AI, but with art criticism,
in which parallels that ignore the nature of the specific medium are not
very useful.

Hope this isn't too didactic,

Patricia Price