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Which Colors Correspond With Which Notes???
- Thread starter Markamb1
- Start date
Passinwind
I know nothing.
- Dec 3, 2003
- 23,044
- 45,901
- Disclosures
- Designer/Toaster Tech @ Passinwind Electronics
Cool, good call IMO. As mostly a jazz player, if you can clearly delineate major vs minor IIIs and somehow make all the VII variations easy to parse by color I'd personally find real value in that. So going by shades of color chromatically would be exactly what I wouldn't want.
If you especially liked KBD's input, here's a handy calculator that'll do the math you: The Color of Sound - Pitch-to-Color Calculator
Oh I see. The flutopedia.com calculator is pretty clear. Although I can't figure out how they got around the problem of visible light being less than an octave. !! (Edit: his low reds are actually invisible infrared, for F etc. )
But yeah just double the Hz until you're up into the range of light.
However I'm more like the poster who said they think of intervals rather than note names for the most part. A major third has a different tonal color than a minor of course. Also absolute low or high notes, or timbre and overtones influence this.
An A or a C# in isolation is meaningless AFAIK, musically or emotionally. So the correspondence with a color seems a mathematical construct without artistic value.
I'd like to see an automatic computer generated light show that would give deep dark colors like blue or burgundy for low notes, notes without a lot of overtones, or minor intervals and chords, and bright colors like orange and white for the opposite!
But yeah just double the Hz until you're up into the range of light.
However I'm more like the poster who said they think of intervals rather than note names for the most part. A major third has a different tonal color than a minor of course. Also absolute low or high notes, or timbre and overtones influence this.
An A or a C# in isolation is meaningless AFAIK, musically or emotionally. So the correspondence with a color seems a mathematical construct without artistic value.
I'd like to see an automatic computer generated light show that would give deep dark colors like blue or burgundy for low notes, notes without a lot of overtones, or minor intervals and chords, and bright colors like orange and white for the opposite!
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Another concept is how color and temperature are related.
Color temperature - Wikipedia
This is interesting in that a blue flame is actually hotter than orange even though blue is a "cooler" color. It goes to show that human artistic or emotional connections or associations may not correspond to what you get with physics.
Color temperature - Wikipedia
This is interesting in that a blue flame is actually hotter than orange even though blue is a "cooler" color. It goes to show that human artistic or emotional connections or associations may not correspond to what you get with physics.
This was one of the first things I saw when I searched it. I didn’t like the idea of violet being the beginning.
In the description all it says is this
“* A binaural beat is an auditory illusion perceived when two different pure-tone sine waves, both with frequencies lower than 1500 Hz, with less than a 40 Hz difference between them, are presented to a listener dichotically (one through each ear). For example, if a 530 Hz pure tone is presented to a subject's right ear, while a 520 Hz pure tone is presented to the subject's left ear, the listener will perceive the auditory illusion of a third tone, in addition to the two pure-tones presented to each ear. The third sound is called a binaural beat, and in this example would have a perceived pitch correlating to a frequency of 10 Hz, that being the difference between the 530 Hz and 520 Hz pure tones presented to each ear.”
Before I knew anything I always thought of E as blue. I knew nothing of color and sound. I thought of deep blue as the darkest color....so lowest note. Still tempting to think about
It doesn’t work the way I thought it would.....from black to white. If we could see beyond our visible spectrum would violet eventually go white and would red go brown then black?
The Colors don’t repeat and yet we have a colour wheel. Red and yellow make orange and so on until indigo and red make violet...violet and orange make red... that’s what seems to close the loop and make it a circle instead of a straight line.
I’m going to color some fretboards to show the two different arrangements I’ll scan and post them so people can tell me which one they think makes more sense for whatever reason.
E-violet
F-red
F#-light red
G-orange
G#-light orange
A-yellow
A#-light yellow
B-green
C-blue
C#-light blue
D-indigo.
D#-light indigo
E-violet
E-red
F-orange
F#--light orange
G-yellow
G#-light yellow
A-green
A#-light green
B-blue
C-Indigo
C#-light indigo
D-violet
D#-light violet
E-red
Any preference just from looking at it? Forget everything else just think about playing it.
The second one give you a sort of Center reference....b is blue. Besides that nothing else lines up.
The second one allows you start at the visible extreme of red on E might just be easier.
I’m still drawn to the first one.
F-red
F#-light red
G-orange
G#-light orange
A-yellow
A#-light yellow
B-green
C-blue
C#-light blue
D-indigo.
D#-light indigo
E-violet
E-red
F-orange
F#--light orange
G-yellow
G#-light yellow
A-green
A#-light green
B-blue
C-Indigo
C#-light indigo
D-violet
D#-light violet
E-red
Any preference just from looking at it? Forget everything else just think about playing it.
The second one give you a sort of Center reference....b is blue. Besides that nothing else lines up.
The second one allows you start at the visible extreme of red on E might just be easier.
I’m still drawn to the first one.
I remain drawn to the alignment I posted before because red is the start of the visible light spectrum, and A is the start of the alphabetical sequence of note names. It also happens to play reasonably well with my Fisher-Price-induced synesthesia:
Which?
Looks cool. Cool point. Need a more differentiated set of color sharps.... I will color scan and post when I get a chance
I like that it get “brighter” from red down then darker but in Colors I would consider lighter... I like yours because it puts E closer to blue which was my first inclination before science. It also helps to think of it as intrusment specific. For guitar it seems like the red start of the light spectrum and the open or first fretted note should line up
The second example would make a 5 string start in blue though.... which for me is kind of a compromise so that my first inclination of blue being the lowest note available to me on an instrument would be intact
For me my synesthesia is so embedded that I think it would be impossible for me to switch alignments between the various instruments that I play.
If you take 3 colors from distant parts of the color wheel and mix them, they tend to make brown. Using paint. (With light it tends to white).
For example just a C major on your first proposal: C blue, E violet, G orange mixed with paint as a chord would make a kind of brown.
