Which Colors Correspond With Which Notes???

[Passinwind]

If you had one fretted bass....with one low e string and only 12 frets.....could you give me a suggestion then? Assuming we tune A to 440hz? PLEASE! Lolololol.... I know you know something! You know something about everything else you must be hiding something lolol

Back when I worked building synths at ARP this was actually a pretty popular topic. Let me sleep on that and I'll see if I dream up anything worthy.

 

[Wasnex]

7 notes
7 primary colors
coincidence?

There are 7 colors in a rainbow...but they are not all primary.

 

[Markamb1]

Back when I worked building synths at ARP this was actually a pretty popular topic. Let me sleep on that and I'll see if I dream up anything worthy.

Thank you

There are 7 colors in a rainbow...but they are not all primary.

I’ve been trying to figure this out on and off for so long...it’s hard enough to find a few people out of thousands of members on a forum, try finding that many people with worthy thoughts in one actual place.

 

[jamro217]

The idea of colors in light (think Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" cover) corresponding to sound isn't far fetched at all. Both are related by their use of vibrations. Thanks, Killed_By_Death for post #4. Some composers used certain keys for their music depending on the moods they evoked. Deciphering the colors, corresponding musical notes and the sympathetic feelings created may not be so easy. If you had a monotone song in a happy key rather than a somber one, would you have to transpose it? What do you do with Coltrane's Giant Steps? You'd look like a cheap, gaudy set of blinking Christmas tree lights. Does this strike a chord? Makes you wonder if the Ric 4005L Light Show bass stuck to the plan and displayed the correct color for each note played.

 

[Wasnex]

I’ve been trying to figure this out on and off for so long...it’s hard enough to find a few people out of thousands of members on a forum, try finding that many people with worthy thoughts in one actual place.

Honest I can't tell if you are saying my thoughts are worthy or unworthy?

Here's a page on color theory Primary Colors of Light and Pigment | learn.

Regarding the premise of associating sound with pitch. I think the best thing you can do is make your own system, or perhaps you could devise an experiment and use statistical modeling to determine the general populations central tendency on color pitch association. Unfortunately I am almost certain the results will not show statistical significance, especially since their are so many pitches and so many shades of color.

Maybe a simplified experiment would be more worthwhile. Color and pitch are both frequency dependent. Red is at the low end of the visual light spectrum and violet is at the high end. So you could run an experiment to see if even the frequency relationships hold true. For example, do people associate red with low frequency sounds and violet with high frequency sounds? If this basic relationship does not hold true, then there is no scientific basis...but there can still be an artistic basis...obviously since it's been done before.

 

[Markamb1]

Honest I can't tell if you are saying my thoughts are worthy or unworthy?

Here's a page on color theory Primary Colors of Light and Pigment | learn.

Regarding the premise of associating sound with pitch. I think the best thing you can do is make your own system, or perhaps you could devise an experiment and use statistical modeling to determine the general populations central tendency on color pitch association. Unfortunately I am almost certain the results will not show statistical significance, especially since their are so many pitches and so many shades of color.

Maybe a simplified experiment would be more worthwhile. Color and pitch are both frequency dependent. Red is at the low end of the visual light spectrum and violet is at the high end. So you could run an experiment to see if even the frequency relationships hold true. For example, do people associate red with low frequency sounds and violet with high frequency sounds? If this basic relationship does not hold true, then there is no scientific basis...but there can still be an artistic basis...obviously since it's been done before.

Neither worthy nor unworthy. Just saying that it is difficult to find worthy opinion among the random or even somewhat specialized social circles. Try going into a music Center and asking someone about this and you’d get some snarky dumb response from someone who doesn’t seem to have ever acknowledged the fact that for everything thing they think they know they Work in a music store.... not a world touring band.....or going to a show and getting lucky enough to meet s9meone you could talk to about this and have a worthy opinion formed.

Here we get the chance to sift through thousands of members... much better odds.... I stayed away from forums after being way too caught up in Taborama as a kid. It shut down... I was freed....I haven’t had enough time again to pursue these things until now but still I spent wayyyyy toooo much time here tonight. At least I’m talking about the stuff I’ve really wanted to know and it’s actually about music....for a change.

 

[Spectrum]

To make colors analogous to sound, consider this:

Humans can see from red to violet. Beyond these is infrared (and microwaves, radio waves, etc.) on the low end, and ultraviolet (and X-rays, gamma rays, etc.) on the high end.

Colors, unlike note names, do not repeat or have "octaves"; they are continuous from red to violet.

Thus, red should represent the low end of human hearing, which is about 20Hz. Violet should represent the upper end of human hearing, which is about 20 kHz (for someone with exceptional hearing, anyway, by the time we are in our 30s most people can't hear that high a pitch).

So your bass fingerboard should start off in red and gradually move up the color spectrum to, well, nowhere near violet, not even close!

Of course all of this is an artificial association, anyway. Light is an electromagnetic wave, while sound is a mechanical pressure wave, the two phenomenon are not related in any meaningful way.

So, do whatever you think looks cool.

 

[jamro217]

For many decades studios used red lights to diminish the noise associated with full spectrum lighting. People who suffer from migraines occasionally benefit from a certain band of green light. Because everything in the universe is made up of molecules and atoms, they all react to vibrations. Water, air and solid compounds all conduct vibrations. Light, sound, electricity all travel in vibrations or waves. We can only react from stimuli we detect. Some detection is subliminal. Just because we don't have all of the answers (or even all of the questions) doesn't mean some things are non existent.

 

[Nev375]

E blue
F purple
G brown
A off white
B yellow
C orange
D red

Green doesn't exist within my musical synesthesia.

 

[AndyPanda]

With sound waves ... you can double or half the frequency and get the same note but up or down an octave. Your ear still recognizes 55hz as an A and also 110hz as an A and 220hz as an A and 440hz as an A and so on. But with light waves/colors ... you double the frequency and your eyes can't even detect it now. There are X-rays and gamma rays and ultraviolet and infrared and lots of other stuff at higher and lower frequencies from the waves that are visible to our eyes. So there isn't a one to one correlation you can use for notes of the scale and colors based on frequency ... but you can certainly choose to think of an A as Red if you want and a G as Yellow and a G# as Orange and an out of tune note would be drifting to one of those in between colors (slightly flat A just starting to shift from Red to Orange). Have at it and knock yourself out - but it doesn't do anything for me to substitute hearing (which is a perfect tool for understanding the notes, music and harmony) for colors to try and understand music and harmony.

 

[Markamb1]

F-red
F#-light red
G-orange
G#-light orange
A-yellow
A#-light yellow
B-green
C-blue
C#-light blue
D-indigo. This part confuses me the difference between indigo and purple
D#-light indigo
E-violet


I see a relationship on the colour wheel where it would or could repeat in a sense

From red....red and yellow make orange and so on get to violet and violet and orange make red.... a little more browning depending but loosely the concept of the wheel in sound and light repeating could be understood.

Please more input though. This is just the only rough basis I’ve ever worked out.

 

[2112]

I have an extremely embedded synesthesia from my childhood spent with the Fisher Price school desk, which has provided me with:

A = Red
B = Orange
C = Yellow
D = Green
E = Blue
F = Purple
G = Red

From there you can figure it out...

 

[jamro217]

F-red
F#-light red
G-orange
G#-light orange
A-yellow
A#-light yellow
B-green
C-blue
C#-light blue
D-indigo. This part confuses me the difference between indigo and purple
D#-light indigo
E-violet


I see a relationship on the colour wheel where it would or could repeat in a sense

From red....red and yellow make orange and so on get to violet and violet and orange make red.... a little more browning depending but loosely the concept of the wheel in sound and light repeating could be understood.

Please more input though. This is just the only rough basis I’ve ever worked out.

The names purple, violet and indigo are virtually interchangeable, but if you think in terms of their places denoting gradients on the color wheel the order would be like this:

Blue, Indigo (bluish purple), Purple (half and half), Violet/Magenta (reddish purple), Red. Indigo would be maybe 66.6% blue and 33.3% red, and violet would be 66.6% red and 33.3% blue. The lines blur but this is an attempt to make a graph out of the color spectrum. Hope it helps.

 

[Markamb1]

If I add 400 to the E of 41hz that’s 441 hz

The lowest measurement of nanometers is between 400 and 450 for violet

Lowest for the measurement of hz is 430 and 480 take away 400 and thats 30 to 80 e string starts at 41 fretted f is 43.... I think I took the 0 from 430 and matched that for my starting point. There were some weird relationships I was drawing to make sense of it...

For me without new information it’s either F or E for red.

The middle of that 430 and 480 is 455.... take away the 400 and thats 55hz which is also the frequency of the 5th fret e string....or open a which is A... the fact that everything is tuned to the 440 A made me think this too.

So A is a maybe....not a thrilling idea though...

I like instead either F or E staring the red colour.

Too tired... I’ll actually check whatever I just wrote tomorrow

 

[gumtown]

With my MIA Fender jazz V and Marshall VBA400 + 810 cab, slamming an open E is definitely a brown note !!

 

[jamro217]

Just out of curiosity, is there a project you are working on that requires this information? There have been studies on the topic for centuries for various reasons. It is a fascinating subject but hasn't yielded too many practical results compared to others. Maybe there's a way to convert colors to some kind of energy. Imagine that. The batteries are dead so you recharge them by shining a certain frequency beam of light on them. Voila! Then you grab your bass and play a tritone up from the corresponding note to the color of the flashlight and the batteries go dead again. D'oh!

 

[Wasnex]

E blue
F purple
G brown
A off white
B yellow
C orange
D red

Green doesn't exist within my musical synesthesia.

green = tacet

 

[Markamb1]

Ever since I learned spectrum of light for purposes of growing plants I’ve wondered...I like correlating patterns I find them everywhere.... if I believed in god the perfection of patterns would be why....science made that more possible for me not less.

It’s for my own benefit... I’d love to play with the relationship....and performance I think it would be cool to see light and hear sound that’s always linked

 

[Wasnex]

With sound waves ... you can double or half the frequency and get the same note but up or down an octave. Your ear still recognizes 55hz as an A and also 110hz as an A and 220hz as an A and 440hz as an A and so on. But with light waves/colors ... you double the frequency and your eyes can't even detect it now. There are X-rays and gamma rays and ultraviolet and infrared and lots of other stuff at higher and lower frequencies from the waves that are visible to our eyes. So there isn't a one to one correlation you can use for notes of the scale and colors based on frequency ... but you can certainly choose to think of an A as Red if you want and a G as Yellow and a G# as Orange and an out of tune note would be drifting to one of those in between colors (slightly flat A just starting to shift from Red to Orange). Have at it and knock yourself out - but it doesn't do anything for me to substitute hearing (which is a perfect tool for understanding the notes, music and harmony) for colors to try and understand music and harmony.

The visible light spectrum corresponds to the approximate frequency band of 440-770thz...so less than an octave. But our eyes don't interpret color the same way our ears interpret sound. Here's an article that claims there are over 300,000 discernible colors: John the Math Guy: How many colors are there - the definitive answer Seems like more than enough to distribute across the range of the piano.

Even though we agree 55hz and 110hz are both A's...they are not the same note. If you really think about it, you will probably agree that music theory is an artificial and rather imperfect construct. It would be easy to create a theory system in which the note names did not repeat every 12 semitones.

To someone with chromesthesia, the tone color relationship is automatic and doesn't have to make any sort of rationale sense.

I suspect that if standardized system was created where given tones were always associated with a specific color, that many people would internalize the association somewhat like many trained musicians develop relative pitch. It might even help people develop perfect pitch since chromesthesia is associated with perfect pitch.

 

[jamro217]

Ever since I learned spectrum of light for purposes of growing plants I’ve wondered...I like correlating patterns I find them everywhere.... if I believed in god the perfection of patterns would be why....science made that more possible for me not less.

It’s for my own benefit... I’d love to play with the relationship....and performance I think it would be cool to see light and hear sound that’s always linked

Each key has a mood associated with it. Some composers would deliberately write in certain keys for that specific purpose. How the variations in pitch and their visual counterparts effect us as humans is intriguing. The human body is made up mostly of water. Perhaps how we sense light and sound is based on how those properties act and react in water. How much of a role does timbre play as opposed to pitch? So many questions, so few answers.