THE COLOR OF MUSIC 4

After I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 I went into my third floor and spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to go about making colors do what musical notes do so well. 

ATTIC WINDOW

Nancy Herman

8" x 6"

I decided to see if I could somehow “translate” music to color and see if the colors made any sense to me.  Were the results beautiful or not basically.  I had already constructed my keyboard.  I placed red in the C position because red and green are in the middle of the spectrum in terms of how light they are.  My choice of red over green was arbitrary, but years later I read that Sir Isaak Newton also associated red with middle C, so at least I was in good company.  As we will see later on it is more important that the colors are tuned in a slow progression from dark to light than that any one color is in the position of C.

      

Notice how red and green are about the same tone or shade.  (These terms apply to the amount of light a color reflects)  Yellow has a lot of light and purple keeps its light to itself.

NEWTON'S DIAGRAM OF COLOR SOUND RELATIONSHIP

to be continued....

Please pass along to anyone you think may be interested.