
Music of the Squares: David R. Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics - benbreen
https://publicdomainreview.org/2019/05/16/music-of-the-squares-david-ramsay-hay-and-the-reinvention-of-pythagorean-aesthetics/
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Jun8
I’ve never heard of Hay’s theory but it’s extremely alluring and interesting
on first look. The proposition that generation of the “beauty” sensation in
the brain should be the same for different types of stimuli, e.g. auditory and
visual and maybe others, too, touch, smell, etc. has a certain Maxwell’s
equations-like unification grandeur to it.

I don’t think this theory is right, though: music generation and appreciation
seems to be linked to language, at least in humans. This is not surprising,
given its syntactic, temporal nature. I don’t think all visual arts work this
way, though you can certainly create beautiful patterns based on music-like
repetition rules, e.g. Islamic geometrical patterns.

Just a hunch, I know nothing about visual arts and even less about music.

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jamiek88
Interesting?

Why would you say music is linked to language?

Chimps beat rhythmic tunes on logs. I reckon music predates language.

Birds have different songs for occasions. Mating etc.

Seems to me rhythm thus music comes before talking.

But I’m just like you, no expert in anthropology.

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oori
The original 1856 Hay book ("The science of beauty: as developed in nature and
applied in art") can be downloaded here:
[https://archive.org/details/scienceofbeautya00hayd_0](https://archive.org/details/scienceofbeautya00hayd_0)

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empath75
They’re quite lovely illustrations in service of pretty bonkers ideas.

