Six Years of Secrecy Finally Lifted — The “Physical Law for Translating Musical Scores into Painting” Is an Epoch-Making Development in 300 Years of History!
Is music really abstract? Does it become abstract art when it is turned into a painting?
No. Tonal music was representational painting all along.
This time, I, Masahiko Yokota, have fully released in a series of four articles one of my core theories, the “Physical Law for Translating Musical Scores into Painting,” which I publicly explained only to Mr. Toyotsu Yamamoto, representative of Tokyo Gallery, in Ginza six years ago and then kept sealed as a secret for six years.
All the latest information is posted on the screen.
The reasons why I decided to make it fully public are as follows.
New theories and discoveries in physics and other fields cannot be patented.
Over the six years, I was able to create and build up a collection of more than ten large-scale pastel paintings based on this law.
Simply saying “I discovered it” was, in many cases, not enough to make people ultimately believe me.
So, why is Yokota's theory epoch-making? Because it solved the “major problem” that no one had been able to solve for 300 years, since Newton in 1704.
◆Jörg Jewanski States the Following in This Paper!
[A major problem of all color organs introduced until now, was that they lacked the possibility to design forms artistically.」
＜Translation＞None of the color organs that had been created could do more than turn point light sources on and off; they could not display artistic forms, let alone the landscapes or human body lines envisioned by a composer, at a glance. This remained the greatest challenge.
Please read the following four articles in order, in which I examine this 300-year history through programs and examples of their outputs.
① First Release — Full Disclosure of the Law and the Complete Python Program
“Finally Lifting Six Years of Secrecy: The Law for Translating Music and Painting” (Article 1)
This is the complete picture of my four laws.
Musical scale = spectrum of light: Do = red to Si = violet, becoming brighter with each octave
Main-key note = dominant color on the canvas: C major is dominated by red, while B major is dominated by blue
Pitch = Y-axis, time = X-axis, timbre = texture, trumpet = yellow, darker below and white above
Rhythm = length of the melody, chord = three-color color chord
I have fully published the Python programs that translate Ryuichi Sakamoto's The Last Emperor and Eiichi Ohtaki's At the Canary Islands. When executed, landscapes such as the Forbidden City, Guilin, and a resort are automatically generated, as shown in the header image. Anyone can reproduce them simply by copying and pasting the code into IDLE.
② Second Proof — Geniuses Were Actually Using Color Chords!
“Examples of Paintings in Which Color Chords Are Actually Used: Ryuzaburo Umehara's Mount Fuji!” (Article 2)
I demonstrate through images that my color chords—C major = red, yellow, and green; Dm = vermilion, yellow, green, and blue—were exactly the color combinations used in the mountain ranges and clouds of Mount Fuji by the national painter Ryuzaburo Umehara, a color scheme that the newspaper praised as a “grand slam home run out of the ballpark.”
Furthermore, I have established that Matisse's Harmony in Red and Portrait of Madame Matisse with a Green Stripe were also painted using the same C major and Dm color chords.
Matisse himself stated in his book Notes of a Painter, “Colors must harmonize like the chords in music. There is no reason why what can be done in music cannot also be done in painting.” I have taken the idea beyond this point and completed it as a theory of chords.
③ Third Examination — A Thorough Comparison with the History and Innovation of Previous Research
“My History of Previous Research on the ‘Physical Law for Translating Musical Scores into Painting,’ and an Examination of the Innovation and Value of My Theory” (Article 3)
Inspired by the correspondence table between sound and color in Newton's Opticks, Krüger proposed a correspondence table between the spectrum and sound in 1743, and Blavatsky proposed the same type of spectrum-and-sound correspondence table as Yokota's theory in 1888. Furthermore, including the principle that colors become brighter with each rise of one octave, Marion established the correspondence table in 1919.
In addition, in recent years there have been various performances involving organs and other systems that correspond sound and painting, including the following.
After examining 300 years through primary sources, I demonstrated that the three representative Japanese attempts and Chapman's prototype all remained at the level of “displaying sound in real time as points of color.” They lacked structural correspondences such as main key = dominant color, chord = color chord, timbre = texture, and rhythm = periodicity, and contained a large amount of intervention by impression, sensation, arbitrariness, and imagination. As a result, they could not make a representational image emerge at a glance.
④ Fourth Symbol — Rimington as the Symbol of the 300-Year-Old “Problem of Being Unable to Create Any Form or Image”
“Rimington's Color Piano, Which Adopted the Spectrum Correspondence Table — As a Symbol of the 300-Year-Old ‘Problem of Being Unable to Create Forms’!” (Article 4)
Rimington's color organ was presented in London in 1895.
It was the first full-scale device using the spectrum correspondence table to generate colors with an arc discharge and prism and project color chords onto a screen using a keyboard.
However, its output was nothing more than a pure show of colored light, with no forms whatsoever. Its philosophy was to discard form, based on the idea that “color should be liberated from the constraints of form.”
Here lies the symbol of the 300-year-old limitation.
My theory has advanced from the projection of colored light over the passage of time to a law that ignores the passage of time and converts a musical score into a painting, automatically generating the same representational images for anyone who sees them—silhouettes such as the Forbidden City, Guilin, the female body, or the repeatedly surging waves on a tropical beach.
This Is an Epoch-Making Theory = an Innovation, Just Like Poincaré's Discovery of Topology!
As Poincaré said, “Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things,” innovation occurs when different things are regarded according to the same law.
My theory combines music and painting through a physical law, overcoming the assumption that they are fundamentally separate things. The era in which many abstract painters simply placed dots, lines, and planes somewhat intuitively based on the assumption that “music is abstract” is over.
Please read all four articles from beginning to end, and use your own PC to discover what kind of landscape that piece of music you are listening to with your own ears actually was.
My discovery of the law of translation of music into painting is a revolutionary innovation for our times!
As the great mathematician Poincaré said, "Mathematics is the art of regarding different things as the same thing." It is a truism that good ideas are those that combine previously thought dissimilar and unrelated things by finding a common law between them.
Such a good idea is called an innovation, and the person who initiates the innovation is called an innovator. In the worlds of academia, the arts, and entrepreneurship, a genius is this innovator. An example of innovation is the iphone, which combines a cell phone and a computer.
I have discovered the following common laws of painting and music.
Tonal music (the music we usually hear that has a dominant tone, such as C major) is almost always inspired by the artist's image of a concrete object, such as a landscape or scene.
Furthermore, tonality has a one-to-one correspondence with spectral color.
Isn't it revolutionarily great to have realized and demonstrated this?
Although there is no Nobel Prize for art, it is a great discovery on the level of the Nobel Prize.
This combination of art and music has marked a milestone in the history of art, and will no doubt revolutionize artistic expression in the future.
My discovery of the law of translation of music into painting is an innovation for the ages!
As the great mathematician Poincaré said, "Mathematics is the art of regarding different things as the same thing." It is a truism that a good idea is a combination of finding a common law between things that were previously considered dissimilar and unrelated.
Such a good idea is called an innovation, and the person who initiates the innovation is called an innovator. In the worlds of academia, the arts, and entrepreneurship, a genius is this innovator.
An example of innovation is the iphone, which combines a cell phone and a computer.
I have discovered the following common laws of painting and music.
Tonal music (the music we usually hear that has a dominant tone, such as C major) is almost always inspired by the artist's image of a concrete object, such as a landscape or scene. Furthermore, tonality has a one-to-one correspondence with spectral color.
Isn't it revolutionarily great to have demonstrated this?
Although there is no Nobel Prize for art, it is a great discovery on the level of the Nobel Prize.
This combination of art and music has marked a milestone in the history of art, and will no doubt revolutionize artistic expression in the future.
A good idea is a new combination of different things When I was young, I was asked by a famous Japanese gallery owner.
He said, "Why do you want to combine music with painting? " He would have said, "If you like painting, I just see an painting! If you like music, I just listen to music."
I was young and could not refute anything at that time.
But this question is the decisive one.
Innovation, in other words, the great invention that revolutionizes an era, is a new combination of different things. (NHK Special: Can Scholars Connect the Universe?)
The genius creator think of combining dissimilar things.
I thougt painting should not be static and should be combined with music in a common law..
That paintings do not have the fascination of music.
That is, it does not have the fascination of rhythm and melody that transitions over time.
Those who are not dissatisfied with that are mediocre.
But those who are aware of this and study how to combine them are as extraordinary as Paul Klee.
Assumption that works of art are motionless like still life
Until now, most people have assumed that a painting is an artwork that does not move , with the exception of cartoons, movies, and mechanical sculptures and machines.
People assumed that art was to be appreciated by staring at the work from the front.
For example, Yoshitomo Nara's painitings (奈良美智）and the Mona Lisa are almost devoid of movement.
There is a person only being still in the center.
Everyone thought that was fine, and no one questioned it.
Until now, translations of paintings into music, such as Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," have been based on nothing more than subjective impressions.
Some people have even invoked the unproven scientific concept of synaesthesia to explain this, but there was no evidence to support the validity of the "impression-based composition" method.
But as one orchestra member told me on Facebook, "Almost everyone in the orchestra was aware of the fact that 'tonal music is always about concrete objects.
If you listen to Smetana's symphonic poem "Moldau," it is clear that the melody represents the meandering of the Moldau River.
I couldn't stand the fact that works of art didn't move, that they didn't have the intense appeal of time-based music, especially rock music, and the triviality of the paintings was the reason I didn't consider painting as my life's work in high school.
This is what Paul Clay meant when he said, "When you look at a painting after listening to a piece of Bach, I can only laugh bitterly.
When I was young, I also had to laugh bitterly when I saw a Picasso painting after listening to the Beatles' music.
Klee, Kandinsky, and Matisse explored the musical state of painting.
But especially postwar American artists like Franz Stella and critics like Greenberg, promoted reductionism, which 'reduces painting to elements that only painting can realize.
That is why this movement came to a dead end with the movement called Minimalism, and the restoration of representational painting, such as Neo-Expressionism, occurred.
I am the first to clearly articulate "What is art?"
I have read many books on aesthetics and art, but I think almost no one has been able to answer the question "What is art? I think almost no one has been able to answer that question in a way that gets to the heart of the matter.
So what is art?
Art is "the expression of something.
What do you think? Can anyone refute this? It is impossible.
Every work of art is created with the intention of its creator, right?
Even Marcel Duchamp's Fountain says, "Art is not only painting. All forms of free expression are art. Isn't that what you wanted to express?
In his book, Hiroshi Senju(千住博）asserts that "art is communication. ("Beauty transcends time" by Hiroshi Senju, Kobunsha Shinsho 美は時を超える」千住博著 光文社新書))
So, is talking to an elderly woman in a disaster-stricken area is art? Is it also art to tell the delivery date of an ordered product over the phone?
This is called rebuttal when evidence is presented that does not fit the theory. University professors should not be allowed to assert disprovable theories
I understand the sentiment behind such advocacy, though, since he use communication in disaster-stricken areas as an example.
In the book "Behind the Scenes of Contemporary Art, Random House Kodansha,（「現代アートの舞台裏、ランダムハウス講談社」P77に）" p. 77, the following is said.
During my stay in Los Angeles, I asked all kinds of people, "What is an artist?" People's reactions were very aggressive.
I came to the conclusion that this must be violating some taboo.
When I pointed this question at the students, he shouted, "It's not fair! One student exclaimed, "This is an absurd question!
An artist holding a key position in the art department of a university called me an "idiot.
No, your questions can only be answered in a tautological way," he said. I mean, to me, an artist is a person who makes art.
It's a circular argument. So only when you meet the artist do you know what an artist is."
Leslie Dick could not believe that there was even one person who was offended. The work of an artist is actually a game and playing," she said. But in a very serious way. It's like a two-year-old discovering how to build a tower with building blocks. It's not something you can do on a whim. You have to catch something inside you and then let it out into the world in order to liberate yourself.
Japanese young painter Yogi Minami 南耀輝 creates abstract paintings based on the theme of "What is the core of art", which is an eternal mystery. This means that he has not yet grasped the core of his work. (Art Collectors Monthly, August 2021, p38 月刊アートコレクターズ 2021年8月号 )
Hiroshi Senju said, "Expression must not be self-expression. It must be everyone's, our expression.. But it is clear that there is no basis for such assertion. (Art Collectors Monthly, June 2021, p24 『月刊アートコレクターズ 2021 ６月号』 p24 )
I have elucidated the significance of abstract painting, which aims at a musical state of painting.
Who is the founder of abstract painting? It is now known that a female painter, Hilma af Klint, painted abstract paintings that are symbolic representations of the unconscious as described by Jungian psychology before Kandinsky..
In this sense, Tibetan Buddhist mandalas are also abstract paintings, as arejapanese Jomon pottery and clay figurines, and humans have been painting abstract pictures for a long time.
Therefore, the theory that "abstract expression appeared because modern humans came to experience nature and things in a more indirect way" is also incorrect.
Nevertheless, it is true that Kandinsky and Klee at the Bauhaus pursued musical expression in their paintings, and American Abstract Expressionism failed to inherit this achievement, and it is Albers' geometric abstraction, which can be said to be an offshoot of the Bauhaus, that has determined the style of American abstract expression in the postwar period. This is the style that determined the postwar American abstract expression style.
Until I came on the scene, the study of the musical state of painting had been sealed off.
And then ,by my researchit turned out that tonal music is always an image of a concrete object, and that the abstract paintings of Kandinsky's late "The greatintegration period "were not tonal music.
In other words, the assumption that "music is abstract" was an obstacle in the way of translating painting into music.
Hence, Nina Kandinsky's remark, "Isn't Picasso's cubism an expression of unadjusted music in painting?"
What, then, do geometric figures such as circles and squares represent?
They are abstract representations and symbols of certain things, such as intellect and masculinity in the case of squares.
The circle is an expression of femininity, physicality, bodily desire, nature, and wholeness like an egg or a star.
And what do figures like the amoeba and seahorse of Kandinsky's later years represent?
Odilon Redon advocated the idea of suggestive art.
This is an image that does not express a definite meaning, but rather suggests something to the viewer that makes him or her imagine something.
Therefore, purely abstract images have this suggestive effect.
Furthermore, there is an expression that Klee highlighted, which also includes the technique of deformation.
Klee said "The person I depict expresses the essence of the person I am depicting better than a photograph of the person himself.
Kandinsky was inspired to become a painter when he saw Monet's Stacks of Straw and he even dreamed of its intense imagery, but at first he choud not recognize it as a depiction of Stacks of Straw. This is the effect of suggestion.
Many abstract painters do not clearly recognize such things, but rather vaguely say, "...isn't it?" and have created their works with a vague, dim awareness of this until now.
I am almost the best pastel painter in the world!
Painters who paint large works in pastels are very rare in the world.
Today, most painters work with acrylics because of their durability and Quick-drying and easy handling.
Historically, the masters of pastel painting are Odilon Redon and Edgar Degas. And Fantin-Latour,and very few others.
So, I can say that I am one of the leading pastel painters of our time.
Some people think that the difference in materials is not a big issue.
However, it is now common knowledge that the power of an original painting is completely different from that of a photograph.
Why do you draw with soft pastels and colored pencils? There is a reason for this.
The reason is that my vision for this painting, entitled "Rei Leonardo da Vinci II," was gradually formed and completed during my college years.
Just before it was completed, I realized that this vision bore a striking resemblance to Redon's "L'Etude à Leonardo da Vinci".
And that is how I learned that this painting, which looks exactly like a Japanese painting, was done in pastel.
Why did Redon use pastels? It was a certainty, no matter how you guessed it, that Redon would have known about Japanese hanging scrolls and would have painted this picture.
He would have used pastels because pastels can achieve the delicate and gorgeous colors of paints like the japanese natural mineral pigments. of Japanese paintings made from crushed gemstones.
Furthermore, at the time I was contemplating painting a yellow swallowtail butterfly (Papilio xuthus)
Soft pastels were so appropriate to express the scales of the swallowtail butterfly that I could think of nothing else. The velvety, powdery surface of the pastel was like scales themselves.
At that time, as a Japanese artist, I had difficulty using oil and acrylic paints. This was a barrier that many Japanese painters had faced for a long time.
Pastels and colored pencils, however, were wonderfully easy to handle and suited my constitution and style.
Oil painting is done by sketching on canvas with thin yellow-oak paints.
Drawing with pencil on canvas is very inconvenient.
Pastel, however, is on paper, so you can sketch as you wish with either pencil or conte, and sketching immediately becomes the creation of a work of art.
Pastels do not need to dry and can be overlaid with line drawings, so they can be created with great speed.
So I would like to ask the opposite question.
Why don't you use pastels and colored pencils?
Pastels, like japanese natural mineral pigments. can easily achieve the wonderful colors that Kunio Motoe（本江 邦夫）, an art critic, has described as "a ceiling of colors that can only be described as innate.
Especially for colorists (painters who are good at color) like me.
I am the reincarnation of Redon.
I became convinced that I was a reincarnation of Redon after the vision of "Homage to Leonardo da Vinci Ⅱ"and a dream I had as a college student in which Oannes, painted by Redon, suddenly appeared to me in a dream and threw at me an art book that looked like a color blindness checkbook, like a Kandinsky abstract.
"In a desolate land where nothing is pleasing to the eye, it was necessary to create something pleasing to the eye by imagination".
This phrase applies directly to my college days, but it is also synchronicity - isn't it? So why was I born again in Hokkaido?
I suppose it was because I wanted to be born a Japanese again, to feel more precisely the delicate and acute aesthetic sensibility of Japan, as evidenced by Redon's "Rei Eto Leonardo da Vinci" (A Celebration of Leonardo da Vinci). But I also guess I didn't want to lose the European sense of beauty that I had acquired as a Frenchman. So I guess I wanted to be reborn in Hokkaido, the European part of Japan.
I can paint as many pictures as I want like Redon.
My junior high school was Kamui Junior High School( 神居中学校 In Japanese, it means "middle school with God）, two grades above me were Koji Tamaki(玉置浩二) who is best singer among prominent musicians in Japan. And there were the members of ANZENCHITAI（安全地帯）that leader is is he .
And my father was there homeroom teacher in Kamui elementary school. Among my father's students is world-renowned manga artist (漫画家）Buichi Terasawa(寺沢武一).
I had a close family relationship with Mr. Terasawa and his family when I was a child.
The drawback of pastels is that they are fragile and vulnerable to sunlight. However, I think this is a more humane way of expressing The central concept of Buddhism, the impermanence of all things.
In other words, I think it is better suited to express the transience of humans, creatures, and history.
Why is a single painting sometimes surprisingly expensive?
It is because it is created with ideas, techniques, and know-how acquired through a great deal of trial and error and hard work.
The amount of books and materials I has read in order to paint a single picture is enormous, and the books in his studio today are kept at the minimum number required.
When I was a university student, I went to bookstores and purchased all the books I could afford in numerous fields, including art books, critiques, and commentary books by Matisse, Kandinsky, Klee, and others, as well as modern thought such as Jungian psychology and structuralism, books on Jaspers and modern psychiatry, books on economics, management, and the history of science, and so on, so that my rooming house The four-and-a-half tatami mats of my lodgings were piled high with these books, and as soon as I lay down to sleep, the Japanese mountains came crashing down all at once, and there were many times when I would get mad and dance recklessly to calm my anger.
When I started working as a teacher, I had nearly 30 large cardboard boxes of books, and I sent a few boxes to my new post and asked my parents to put the rest on the second floor of their house. I was saddened to hear him yell at me, "You're going to kill my parents!".
This vast amount of reading continued until I reached the age of 60, and even then, it has been less and less recently.
Books are not enough to read. It must be deeply contemplated in order to generate one's own thought. Books can also be used as data for research and to refer to only a part of the book.
As a result of such reading, I had built a library in my mind. Important books are grouped by field and memorized, and the relationships and connections between each field are linked, so that when necessary, the contents can be drawn out and used for production, writing, and contemplation.
Without this, one cannot go beyond the realm of a mere trivia buff or know-it-all and create something new.
I think Japanese Seigo Matsuoka (松岡正剛)is such a dilettante.
Jungian psychology and Goethe's Faustian worldview as central ideas for my production.
Of all the books I have read since college, psychoanalysis has been central to the formation of the self, especially Jungian psychology. I became aware of Jungian psychology because a friend who likeda Japanese novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui (筒井康隆）introduced me to Tsutsui's books and because the world-class artistTadanori Yokoo （横尾忠則）was devoted to Jung for a time.
When I was in college, I wrote a trilogy of novels to become a novelist because I wanted to leave college. It is titled "Bad Girls, Lovers, and Goddesses," which I intend to publish after my death. Some time after I finished writing it, I realized that the content of the book was completely consistent with Jung's theory of anima, and that the story was very similar to Goethe's Faust.
Jungian psychology is a theory of self-realization that he named individuation.
The theory states that each human being has a unique combination of talents, and that the way of life is to let them flourish throughout one's life, but that aiming for this is risky, and only a limited number of people can achieve it.
In the extreme, a successful person who has a great impact on society can be said to have achieved self-realization. Regardless of whether it is a positive or negative influence.
Every piece of my work reflects the process of my personalization.
Therefore, the point of purchasing my work is to have the opportunity to learn about the ideas I have created.
Consultation on the purchase of pastel original drawings and large size giclee prints
Hello, This is Masahiko Yokota（横田昌彦）.
I am not currently selling original pastel drawings.
One reason is that I would like to have my drawings on hand for display at a solo exhibition that I will hold in the near future.
Another reason is that I have strong doubts about the fact that the artist will not receive even a thousand dollars in profit when the price of the sold work rises in the market.
However, we have received a small number of inquiries from people who wish to purchase original pastel paintings.
We also receive requests from people who would like to have a pastel drawing of this or that size painted in this or that way.
In addition, we have received quite a few inquiries from people who wish to purchase Giclee prints that are also large in size and stretched on canvas.
Therefore, we would like to sell these art works, including creating and delivering new art works, if both parties agree to the terms and conditions.
If you are interested, please feel free to contact us using this consultation form.
For giclee prints, please provide us with details such as the size of the work, desired materials, and location of use, and we will prepare and send you a quotation.
You can also view the original artwork at the ’Sapporo Web Programming School ’classroom in Japan, which we manage, so please feel free to use this form to contact us about this as well.
Prices start at 50,000 yen for the small size giclee prints without frames.
We expect pastel originals to start at 200,000 yen, and A0 size (841 x 1189mm) at 300,000 yen.
I am a modern artist living in Sapporo-shi Hokkaido Japan. I wanted to be an modern artist from college student days and mastered modern art by self-education.
When I drew a picture work and saved it,I did a business activity to become a painter under contract to the commercial art gallery in Ginza and Kyobashi Tokyo.
As a result, my work is appreciated by the owner of the contemporary art gallery on behalf of Japan. For a long time, I drew a picture with a soft pastel and colored pencil on paper.
I discovered an existing common scientific law between music and pictures by a longtime study. This epoch‐making discovery is the first time in the world I applied myself to the study of popular music. As a result I succeeded in expressing rhythm, melody, musical scale, dominant note by a picture.
◆【Occupation】Sapporo WEB programming school management
◆【Educational background 】Otaru University of Commerce graduate
