After a concert, on being asked to describe the character of the music they have just heard, many people surprisingly fall back on the visual analogies of landscapes;from the Alps through billowing fields of wheat to churning seas. The visual imagination of our inner eye blocks or replaces the memory of the actual sonic experience. Even composers, whose metier is music itself, are not afraid of presenting their sounds as visualized ambiences; this is not only found in program music. However, the imitation of nature as a process, assumes that the extracted analogy is evident to all.

Relating sonic art to visual art constitutes a further step back, but – by degree of their separation – the membrane and reality of each art form remains intact. It is asecretive and often precarious undertaking, to allow a correspondence between both art forms. Each has a different perception of time, a different significance – even the semantics are not comparable. Despite all its attempts at “imitating” reality, a painting remains a designed artifact. Even in the first cave drawings, this impossibility of a realistic emulation of nature becomes manifest, as too does the adventure of arts transgression over reality.