Let the paintings play

TL;DR

This paper presents a mathematical approach to quantify similarities between paintings and musical tracks using orthogonal basis function expansions, enabling cross-modal analysis and comparison.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel method combining Fourier and wavelet bases for digitalizing and comparing visual and auditory artworks, with an accessible implementation.

Findings

Successful analysis of Morandini's artworks and music.

Development of a downloadable applet for cross-modal similarity assessment.

Demonstration of the method's effectiveness in art and music comparison.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a mathematical method to extract similarities between paintings and musical tracks. Our approach is based on the digitalization of both paintings and musical tracks by means of finite expansions in terms of orthogonal basis functions (with both Fourier and wavelet bases). The best fit between a specific painting and a sample of musical tracks from a given composer is achieved via an $L^2$ projection upon a finite-dimensional subspace. Several examples are provided for the analysis of a collection of works of art by the Italian artist Marcello Morandini. Finally, we have developed an original applet that implements the process above and which can be freely downloaded from the site https://github.com/pgerva/playing-paintings.git