Does this really make sense to relate music to sequences of images or to smells? Language, mathematical representations and basic physiological considerations seem to respond in a positive way to this question.
- What could mean the sentence “Sushi are the jazz of food”? This metaphorical expression is interesting as it shows how language bridges sensory experiences. Similar words are often used to describe feelings linked to different sensory modalities: paintings can be characterized linguistically by their rhythms, a musical interpretation can be intense or brilliant, a timbre clear, a wine well balanced or having a exquisite bouquet. And a tone belongs to musical and color vocabularies.
- In mathematics, the same kinds of simple models featuring entities as points in appropriate multidimensional spaces are often used and some numbers or geometrical figures seem to underpin harmonic ratios be it between different dimensions in paintings, architectural work or durations in musical pieces. This suggests that those different inputs to our sensory channels share at least some common patterns.
- From a more physical and physiological view points, it can be underlined that sounds and images are both waves which are processed as a set of frequencies by our auditory and visual apparatus, that local processing of part of the input is followed by a more global processing which extracts forms and patterns, and that at a later stage identical semantic categories are activated and common emotions like happiness, sadness, anger, or fear are induced.
- Neurological disorders like synesthesia could also indicate that the different pathways used by our senses to elicit cognitive responses are not so distant. This being written, this would not be careful to go further down this way to find similarities between the senses as neuroimaging has also shown that music, olfaction or vision engage multiple areas of the brains which are domain-specific (Thomson, 2015).
- Simple correspondences are easy to establish: intensity in music can be linked to luminosity for instance or rythm to density of lines. Repetitions, variations are possible for different sensory inputs and variations are underpinned – at least some of them – by similar operations playing with symetry, ornementation, change of scale, regrouping …