With some reservations about the mappability of these realms onto each other, I'll give it a try. This is the first, unrevised, effort and it took about 30 seconds. Melody - subject Harmony - colour Tempo - perspective Form - subject layout Rythm - brush strokes Timbre - light source & shadowing Tempo was perhaps the most difficult one to match up - unsurprisingly, because music exists in time and a painting doesn't. OTOH, I paired up rhythm with brush strokes straight away. Perhaps the fact that I'm an ex-drummer comes into it - I've spent a lot of time laying down the rhythm with (wire) brush strokes. How can you compare the temporal aspects of listening to music and looking at a painting? To some extent the eye takes in everything at once, but at a finer level you only look at one thing at a time. There's a "scanning" process covering the whole canvas, and another process whereby the eye is drawn by the composition to a particular feature of interest and then on to another. A traditional representative picture in perspective allows the eye to wander slowly between "near" and "distant" parts of the picture, absorbing the whole structure gradually, but a picture without conventional perspective throws everything at you all at once, forcing the mind to work at full speed to sort it all out. There is at least some loose sort of an analogy with slow and fast tempi here. Possibly. Ian Crisp [log in to unmask]