ABSTRACT
In his lectures of 1864, “Philosophy of Art,” philosopher and art historian Hippolyte Taine told his audience that the mathematical laws of sensation provided the basis of a truly modern art that the age demanded but which did not yet exist. Practitioners in any medium would break free of both tired convention and novelty for its own sake by discovering the “scales” that would assure them more formalized control over the conditions of experience.1 I have used the English word “scales” to translate his term gamme as he based his discussion on music before he addressed other media. However, gamme is a word with broader usage. It can refer as readily to the painter’s palette, the light spectrum, or any organized arrangement of sensations, for which English uses the less technical cognate “gamut.” This word gamme shifted attention from individual signs and the referents they invoked to a process of meaning formation grounded in the systematic relationships linking sensations.
