Music of the Squares: David R. Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics

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.

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

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