How is it that we are able to find correspondences between an auditory experience and a visual experience?
This question leads to others:
I have two reasons for wanting to answer these questions. First, although I've been working on this project for more than 30 years, I've never tried to describe, clearly, what I'm doing. I'd like to get a better grasp of that, so that I could focus more clearly on what's important. Second, the desires and goals that motivate my work are different from those that motivate other practitioners of music visualization; I hope this article to serve as an apologia, to help my audience better align their expectations with my intent.
Why is this the right place to start?
Forming an analogical association between two experiences is not a rare occurrence; we (and, it would seem, other creatures) do it all the time; it's the basis of what we do to make sense of our environment. (Douglas Hofstadter goes so far as to suggest that analogical thinking is the very core of cognition.) The most obvious kind of association is between two experiences of the same kind; for example, when you see something you've seen before, you think "it's the same thing" or "it's that thing." But associations between two different kinds of experience are also common; when you see and hear a lion roar, you know that what you're seeing and what you're hearing are both manifestations of the same event, and when you subsequently think about a lion's roar, you will likely bring to mind both the image and the sound.
Notes ...