Music is a wave, painting is a particle.
Music (sound art) lasts in time and stops only by the weakness of the author and the listener. A sound work by definition cannot consist of a single note, a single sound.
Painting (visual art) is a freeze frame, even when it is a film. Visual art can always be reduced to a single frame.
Listening tries to perceive music in its extension, like a wave. Looking tries to imagine a lasting image as a particle. A statue is a visual particle.
The world as sound is symphony, the world as image is sculpture.
Speech is the primary means of communication; visual and sound arts remain auxiliary. Art is not a means of communication, it is a means of cognition, which may or may not be part of communication, being an absolutely self-sufficient monologue.
Speech has its particles and its waves. A vowel is a particle. Poetry is a wave.
The wave nature of poetry leads to the loss of rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme helped to give poetry the semblance of particles following in a certain order, folding into a wave. Poetry, however, tends to free itself from all order and become pure sound, but a sound made of words.
Poetry is speech that has become music. Alas, more often speech becomes a primitive comic strip, a set of toys or labels. The thundering poetry of antiquity, like the Iliad, is a verbal Parthenon, a set of imposing statues.
Speech is neither a particle nor a wave, nor is it the joining of particles into a wave. Words are not particles, sentences and monologues are not waves. Speech is a unique phenomenon that cannot be replaced by any art. When speech becomes ‘the art of speech’ it loses its most important property - to create communication between living people, communication on equal terms, communication as potentially profound and productive as thinking within a single brain. Art is presented to the other, speech is co-created with the other. Only speech allows a person not to be manipulated by the other and not to manipulate the other. Unfortunately, there is very little speech in speech. Most communication is pseudo-communication, form without content, manipulation of one kind or another.