The Conservation of Beauty

I'm working on a hard science fiction story concerning aliens that have a different array of senses than do humans. In the story, Earth has received an unintelligible message from them. The issue of the story revolves around aesthetics. And the question is: Can one find a mathematical transformation to convert something an individual perceives as beautiful in one of the human senses to another something using another sense. E.g. if one finds a particular piece of sculpture beautiful, is there a transformation to, say, music that the same individual also finds beautiful. Or, equivalently, is there a transformation from sculpture to music that preserves beauty?

While working on the story, I realized that I can do this. I can translate sculpture to music (and back). The method is rather technical, but (in short) involves treating Hadamard transforms as Walsh function. Whether beauty will be conserved, I don't know. But I am eager to write the code and try it. My first try will be to convert a sphere to music. The algorithm will turn any axially symmetric object to a single tone, but one rich in harmonics. Then I'll progress to classical sculptures.

If Analog Magazine buys the story (I've sold them about 35 since my first in 2003), I'll put the results up on their site (a redirect to my site, actually) so readers can view the sculptures and hear the translations to music.

The last time (time before last, actually) I did something like this, it was a translation of some of the fruit fly genome to music. The result, to me, was incredibly beautiful. I wrote a story using the idea, sold it to Analog, and had the music (and an explanation of how it was done) up on the Analog website (as a 'Science Behind the Story' article). Unfortunately, the traffic to that mp3 on their site crashed the entire Dell Magazine website and the site's webmaster removed the mp3 (angering a lot of people referred to the site by Boing Boing).
The next time I did a story with an audio theme, I asked that, instead of hosting the Science Behind the Story article (with many sound files) on their site, they just redirect to mine (I have much more available bandwidth than do they). And they did.

If you want to listen to the fruit fly music (which I've called, 'The Little March of the Fruitflies'), you can find the mp3 either on my site www.frithrik.com or on the Analog site (after a few weeks, the put it up on their site again), www.analogsf.com (look for a Science Behind the Story article for 'The Fruitcake Genome').

www.frithrik.com
www.analogsf.com (hear fruitfly music mp3 here)