I have this habit - whenever I try to explain my views of a certain artistic medium I usually end up bringing in other forms of art. It's long been my contention that all artistic media are interrelated. But each independent medium (let's exclude film which is the mixture of four media) strikes us in its own way. Despite the "high art" aspect so many people like to place on literature (and I'm a writer so I think I'm qualified to say this), I think the "highest" art form is music, simply because it's able to connect with us more strongly than any other, is able to bring out of us, with such ease, the strongest and most basic of emotions. It's also the most obscure, as far as trying to figure out WHY certain musical phrases, certain sounds and combinations of sounds, why certain sorts of pauses in certain contexts, all affect such large portions of us in very similar ways. Most of this, it seems to me, is a product of chemistry - and that's not the realm of philosophy - but the philosophical question, I think, is this :

In what ways are all the independent artistic media (film excluded) related? In what ways are they NOT related? Surely the different media affect different parts of the brain, but the way they're processed is always an artistic process (in other words, the psychological transformation of information into art), therefore: Does that not require the same part(s) of the brain?

Perhaps this is clumsily (at least hurriedly) composed, and anybody feel free to iron it out for me.