In everyday life, we constantly rely on our understanding of a situation's context in order to interpret it adequately. To do this, we fall back on cognitive shortcuts that have proven their worth—whether they are sociocultural (e.g., clothing as an indication of social status) or evolutionary (e.g., black food is inedible; low-pitched noises mean danger).

These automatisms reduce complexity, relieve the perceptual apparatus, and make us capable of acting—or at least provide indications of appropriate behavior. These are the unconscious processes that the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has described as "fast thinking" (System 1). In complex societies with highly differentiated and multi-layered networks of relationships, however, these generalizations can have dark sides—for example, when they become entrenched as stereotypes. They thus become an ethical problem when certain external characteristics are used to evaluate fellow human beings, and a cognitive one because they handle ambiguity poorly (i.e., have low tolerance for ambiguity), leading to misjudgments.

Ingrained patterns of interpretation are therefore also an instrument of manipulation - be it politically motivated (propaganda, stigmatization of minorities) or commercial (advertising thrives on evoking certain emotional reactions through sounds and images).It is therefore all the more important to become aware of the pitfalls of "quick thinking" and at the same time to recognize that we humans, as "animal symbolicum" (Ernst Cassirer), cannot help but think and perceive the world as a collection of symbolic forms. This form of self-reflection is a task of art if it succeeds in making the counterfactual "what if" not only thinkable but also tangible.It thus pursues on an aesthetic level what Ludwig Wittgenstein formulated as the goal of philosophy: "Showing the fly the way out of the fly glass."

Art transcends (exceeds) and thus decentres (shifts) the realm of supposed certainties and allows them to be broken open.This results in potentially new perceptions of the world (without already defining them) - the senses can take a deep breath and temporarily readjust themselves.As a listening city, we want to artistically trace the syntactic and semantic connections between acoustic and visual impressions and question their suggestive and appellative character by practically reinterpreting them.By detaching (abstracting) images and sounds from their contexts of origin, for example, we create what the composer and sound researcher R. Murray Schafer has described as "schizophony". This first requires a detailed examination of the physiological, psychological and socio-cultural conditions that shape our patterns of interpretation in the interplay of sounds, colors and shapes.

Linguistic expressions can also provide information here, for example when talking about timbres or distortions:Such homonymies raise questions about how such associations, relations and translations come about, to what extent the thesis of the sensory hierarchy (sense of sight as the primary sense) is tenable, how and to what degree these connections are malleable, etc.Psychological and neurological case studies also inform us, through the description of unusual states and dispositions - whether they are classified as pathological (amusia) or not (synesthesia) - about where artistic reinterpretations could start.In the course of this, a categorial system (a kind of ontology) will also be developed, which offers a rough grid for the different characteristics and relationship levels of sounds and images.This basis forms a hand for the actual artistic examination.