Nanopublication — Harmonics on the Minimalism of Octaves
Claim 1: Harmonics on the Minimalism of Octaves
The emission is minimal — three Cs, nothing more. The same pitch class repeated across registers, the poorest possible chord, barely a chord at all. But this poverty is exactly what makes the harmonic series visible. With no other fundamental introduced, nothing masks the natural overtones of C: they reinforce octave by octave and saturate the air above the trunk. G arrives as yellow-orange — the third harmonic, doubled and tripled across the registers. D appears as orange high up; Bb, slightly flat, as blue-violet; E and A take their fixed places on the scale. The seventh, eleventh, and thirteenth harmonics fall between tempered pitches and pass in silence — the painted scale cannot hold them. All of this arrives by physics, not by choice. The painting is almost entirely accent and almost entirely unchosen: minimum gesture, maximum apparition. Played sostenuto, ppp, pedal down — a chord no finger touched.
Context
The work stages an inverse ratio between artistic choice and visual content. I select only the root; the chromesthetic codex applied to a single sustained pitch reveals the harmonic structure already contained within it. The codex here is not composition but probe — it does not add meaning, it exposes what was already physically present. The minimalism of octaves [1] is the precondition: with no other fundamental introduced, the overtone series of C reinforces itself across registers and emerges cleanly as color, where richer chords would saturate the field and mask their own harmonics.
This places the painting alongside two propositions of ideamorphism. Proposition 13 (generative loss) is made literal: 1 ≠ 1, one chosen note becomes many emergent colors, and the gap between input and output is where creation lives. Proposition 26 (induced diffraction) is inverted at the limit: the codex applied to the minimum possible stimulus generates the maximum perceptual content the system can hold. The boundary of the painted scale — those harmonics that fall between tempered pitches and cannot be assigned a color — is the codex acknowledging its own resolution.
References
[1] Arnaud Quercy (2024). C Octaves - Reflexions 23 — Catalog raisonné. https://arnaudquercy.art/en/catalogue-raisonne/AQC0698.html
[2] Quercy, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-2662-7790
[3] Quercy, A. (2026). *The 31 Propositions of Ideamorphism*. Multimodal Institute, MMI-AX-001. Propositions 13 (Generative Loss), 14 (The Codex as Ouverture), 26 (Induced Diffraction).
[4] Quercy, A. (2026). *Manifesto Ideamorphiste* (Revised Edition). Art Quam Anima Publishing New York, LLC.
[5] Quercy, A. *Circle of Fifths → Color Wheel Mapping*. Synesthetic Explorations reference document, Multimodal Institute.
Where this work lives
Thematic Elements
Epistemic profile
| Claim type | artistic statement |
|---|---|
| Voice | first person |
| Epistemic status | first person attestation |
| Methodology | chromesthetic translation |
| Certainty | high |
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