{"id":20,"date":"2008-07-16T03:21:17","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T02:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spheres.edublogs.org\/?page_id=11"},"modified":"2016-11-17T11:44:02","modified_gmt":"2016-11-17T11:44:02","slug":"colour","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.paulj.myzen.co.uk\/blog\/teaching\/spheres\/lectures\/colour\/","title":{"rendered":"4: Music \/ Colour"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\"opus3\"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.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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’.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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).<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
But in what sense, beyond the analogous, the subjective and the metaphoric, does colour relate to sound and music?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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