Music of the Spheres

4: Music / Colour

In this section, we will be considering the relationship – physical, perceptual and aesthetic – between colour, visual art and certain film arts, and sound and music. More specifically, we will consider a number of theorists, composers and artists who have, through conscious application, sought to apply certain organisational principles from one medium to another. There are many historical precedents for assuming a relationship between colour and sound. The apparent correspondence between the seven colours of the visible light spectrum and the seven diatonic notes of the western musical scale, both representing an ordering of a physical continuum, attracted the attention of philosophers and scientists alike, from Pythagoras to Isaac Newton, whose experiments sought, in part, to confirm a ‘grand order’ principle behind natural phenomena and the human perception of those phenomena.
The well-documented condition of synaesthesia – the perception of one sensory stimulus by organs usually associated with the reception of another stimulus (hearing colours, seeing smells, etc.) – has continued to add support, albeit subjective, to possible relationships between colour and music.
Historical considerations of the relationship between colour and music tend to be framed as relationships between distinct and particular colours and individual pitches or combinations of pitches. However (and whatever definition of music you prefer to subscribe to), music is a time-based art in a sense that visual art – at least, painting – is not. It is perhaps this distinction that led to the development of and fascination with machines that enabled the kinetic organisation of colour through various methods of projection, and to experiments in animation-based ‘visual music’.
Musical terminology also tends to the analogous, consistently inviting correspondences between sound, colour and emotion: sound quality may be perceived as being ‘bright’ or ‘dark’; orchestration may be described as ‘colourful’; certain jazz music components might be ‘blue’. Indeed, we lack a simple and convenient method for qualifying the perception of frequency combinations, and resort to speaking of the ‘colour’ of a sound (even the slightly more high-brow ‘timbre’ means much the same thing in French).
But in what sense, beyond the analogous, the subjective and the metaphoric, does colour relate to sound and music?
Class Documents Lecture 4 – notes Text Examples Newton – Proposition 6, Problem 2, from Book 1, Part 2 of Opticks Franssen – Extract from The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Betrand Castel (see below) Wilfred – Light and the Artist Sound Examples Eine blasse Wäscherin from Pierrot Lunaire – Arnold Schönberg Farben fron Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16 – Arnold Schönberg Symphonie, op. 21 – Anton Webern Chronochromie – Olivier Messiaen Couleurs de la cité celeste – Olivier Messiaen Image Gallery
Articles The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Betrand Castel – Maarten Franssen The Creation of Color in 18th-Century Europe – Sarah Lowengard Colour Harmony – Stephen Westland et al Visual Music: html \| pdf – Maura McDonnell Instruments to Perform Color-Music – Two Centuries of Technological Experimentation – Kenneth Peacock Verdi, Richard, 1968. ‘Musical Influences on the Art of Paul Klee’ in Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 3 (1968), pp. 81-107. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4104301 Perloff, Nancy, 1983. ‘Klee and Webern: Speculations on Modernist Theories of Composition’ in The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 180-208. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/741949 Bernard, Jonathan W. 1986. ‘Messiaen’s Synaesthesia: The Correspondence between Color and Sound Structure in his Music’ in Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall, 1986), pp. 41-68. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40285351 Color Harmonies and Color Spaces Used by Olivier Messiaen in Couleurs de la cité céleste – Paul Dworak
Audio & Visual Examples on YouTube and the National Film Board of Canada of animations by Norman McLaren Examples on YouTube of animations by Harry Smith
Internet Sites The Center for Visual Music is a non-profit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is committed to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and other material. Rhythmic Light is an introduction to the fine art of playing images in the way that musicians play with sound. It is an art that has been almost three centuries in the birthing and that has gone by a variety of names – visual music, colour music, audio-visual-music, motion graphics, synchromy, and lumia. The iotaCenter is dedicated to preserving, promoting and uniting the dynamic world of visual music through our various programs: research, publication, preservation, exhibition and distribution. Our programs together celebrate this art form from its earliest appearance through its current expression with the latest technologies. The Fischinger Trust and Archive is the official website, and a clearing house, for information on Oskar Fischinger’s films, paintings and other work. Colour Music is a well-illustrated site containing sections on the history of experiments relating music to colour, Colour Music in Australia, and Colour Music in the New Age.