Which Colors Correspond With Which Notes???

[Andy235]

So far it seems like E should be Violet and F should start the spectrum again At Red.

If you don’t care, don’t post. If you don’t think it matters, you’re right! Read and comment on something else. Lol thanks

Any other input is appreciated

But........

I’ve been dying to associate the right Colour with the right Notes. I want to take one guitar and one bass.... sticker each fret with the notes and colour of the note....

Every source I’ve researched has a different opinion...

spectrum of light waves do roughly correspond with the frequencies of sound waves ....

I’m hoping some of you have thought about this as well or are interested enough to do some searching...

I think you could also shade those colours up and down per octave.

I’d like enough reasoning to definitively decide on the right colours for the right notes.

There’s info all over the world....I found technical information associated with numbers and spirtual information associated with the senses.

What do you think?

I’d like to do this with a higher end fretlight guitar. Lights in the fretboard light up to show chords but more importantly all the relevant notes in any scale you can think of. Would be an amazing upgrade for the fretlight concept to have the notes coloured.

I have a kind of synesthesia. I don't actually "see" the music with my eyes, but when I hear music, it makes patterns, colors, shapes etc in my mind. Now I don't see different notes as different colors, but different instruments and different tones do look different. For example, distorted lead guitar might be shaped like jagged lines on a monitor screen or kind of like lightning. Bass lines tend to be shapes formed by separate "blocks" (each note being a block or a blurb). Bass isn't very colorful, and the kind of bass I like (think British sixties flatwound deep thuddy tone or Jamerson and his dead strings and deep grooves) is really "gray", but I like "gray bass". Some bass that has more color but I love is some of McCartney's stuff on Sgt. Pepper. ( That whole album is very "colorful" sounding in general.)
It is hard to explain. It was years before I realized most people don't see the music in their head like I do. I guess when I was young I just assumed it was normal.

 

[retslock]

I started a thread on synesthesia a few weeks ago in elsewhere asking if anyone else “saw” bass lines themselves as having colors and if so, did it help in playing.

For instance, when playing bass everything I play is in colors and shapes (like line drawings) all over the fingerboard. It helps me remember sections - “Oh, it’s that light green steam engine part” or “this section is 2 red cat ears - one set of dark red tabby ears followed by the set bright red tabby ears and then there’s a grey garage slab.” (Note that these are actual examples - the first is a riff from Dream Theaters “Dance of Eternity” that I cover while the other is from a new cover I’m working on - Steve Vai’s “Fire Garden Suite - Bull Whip” - recording the vid for my channel today ).

I don’t know how colors get associated with notes or patterns and stuff but C is light green, G is medium green, F is silver and shimmers a bit, etc. (there no purple or yellow lines though, and some colors (red and green) have light and dark versions, blue is only one note F#). When the individual notes get strung together into patterns they literally become colored lines dominated by one main color but change colors with each section and resemble other things in my head - and that’s how I remember songs.

I can draw songs from the patterns line by line and know what song is what by looking at the drawings later, or see something like rooftops from British Row houses and think “Oh - that looks like the section from (whatever song)” or see a color and think “That’s from that Genesis song “One for the Vine.”

That’s how it works for me.

Wow you have an interesting brain. Using descriptions of actual physical items to help - isn’t that called mnemonics? I have done that as a conscious exercise to help me remember the shopping list would you believe. It really works. By attaching any image - in my case I used physical locations, silly things like carrots in the mailbox and milk on the front step or whatever and they really do work. For a guy like me who has a very bad memory, anything that helps is a good thing.
The human brain - even mine, is stunningly creative and that can be demonstrated by the fact that it invents all kinds of crazy stuff in our dreams when we sleep. We can see colours and shapes inside your eyelids as light flashes across your face while driving in a car on a sunny day. I sometimes see the most amazing coloured light shows inside my eyelids while trying to get to sleep in a pitch black room. The brain is a wonderful thing and even though science knows a whole lot about it, scientists realise they really know so little of it’s capabilities.

 

[Wasnex]

If you get deeper in that thread I also did plots further up the neck, with very different results. So as usual...just depends. BTW, those waterfall plots take a while to render, so for something like a live color organ something else would likely work better.

I agree. The waterfall plots display the note envelope over time. I would assume this takes a lot of processing power, so not good for a real time display. I was thinking more of a spectrum analyzer that only displays frequency and intensity content in real time. The simplest spectrum analyzers don't even use any sort of computer processing...think analog RTA analyzer.

 

[Bass Momma]

So far it seems like E should be Violet and F should start the spectrum again At Red.

If you don’t care, don’t post. If you don’t think it matters, you’re right! Read and comment on something else. Lol thanks

Any other input is appreciated

But........

I’ve been dying to associate the right Colour with the right Notes. I want to take one guitar and one bass.... sticker each fret with the notes and colour of the note....

Every source I’ve researched has a different opinion...

spectrum of light waves do roughly correspond with the frequencies of sound waves ....

I’m hoping some of you have thought about this as well or are interested enough to do some searching...

I think you could also shade those colours up and down per octave.

I’d like enough reasoning to definitively decide on the right colours for the right notes.

There’s info all over the world....I found technical information associated with numbers and spirtual information associated with the senses.

What do you think?

I’d like to do this with a higher end fretlight guitar. Lights in the fretboard light up to show chords but more importantly all the relevant notes in any scale you can think of. Would be an amazing upgrade for the fretlight concept to have the notes coloured.

Are you talking about synesthesia? How some people hear sound as color? I know a top guitarist who has this. I checked his note/color matches, and they weren't in spectral order. That is, as the frequency of the tone went up, the frequency of the color (ie on the light spectrum) could go either up or down.

 

[Ekulati]

Actually it was the idea of what pitch , or sound, should be A.
For whatever pitch is selected, it's frequency/wavelength is determined. Every pitch we hear no matter what we call it, it's frequency is the inherent cause of the tone and is unchanging.

Your writing makes no sense whatsoever. And it's "its," not "it's."

 

[retslock]

Obviously it’s going to be different to everyone. And you can’t look too technically for empirical evidence.

What you have to realize about visible light is that our spectrum of what we see is extremely narrow. 400-700nm range is less than “an octave”.

Imagine only being able to hear the fundamentals of C4-C5 on a piano (and none of the associated overtones). This is where the literal analogy to perceptible visible light falls apart.

It occurs to me that what we are talking about in this thread, is not whether colour and light have an esoteric fundamental and indelible relationship but rather, how different brains relate colour to sound in their own way. This is about brains, not measured scientific tables.

 

[BassBrass]

Metal/straw just reminds me of Mitchell and Webb's 'Met-al or norm-al' sketches...

I cant figure out why this is considered funny at all, it belongs at Grot Shop*, as a useless thing, although everything else of theirs is Very funny. *noun: Trash, garbage, or filth.
British slang.
Famously, in the 1970s BBC comedy "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin," Reggie opened a doomed (he hoped) shop that sold old bits of trash and scrap recycled into completely useless items. He called it "The Grot Shop." (To Reg's horror, the shop was wildly successful, leading to a string of Grot Shops and, eventually, Grot Industries.)

 

[retslock]

Where's the brown note fit in?

Years ago a keyboard player friend (one of the synesthesia guys I mentioned earlier) was messing with the oscillators on his synth. He turned the amplitude up a bit so we could hear the notes very well then he started lowering the oscillator. It got lower and lower and as it did the sound level got quieter until we couldn’t hear it anymore. I could see the speaker cone going nuts but could not hear much at all. I then became aware of a very uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. There was movement down there. Something was going on in my guts that I didn’t like. I think he felt it too so he didn’t persist but I think he found the brown note.

 

[tubedude]

Your writing makes no sense whatsoever. And it's "its," not "it's."

Oh, correct. Score one the grammar police.
Sorry you don't understand what i was attempting to communicate, my wife suffers from that also.

 

[stringthrough]

New age "stuff"..... You're trying to associate sound frequencies with how our eyes and brain perceive a narrow range of electromagnetic wave frequencies. Apples and oranges. Read good introduction to physics and human physiology books and consider abandoning your quest.

 

[Rip Van Dan]

That’s awesome I’m printing that out. Lots of cool stuff to think about in that.

So open low e is 41hz. The fretted 12th string on low E 82hz is the same frequency as a fretted d string at the second fret 82hz...one octave higher doubles the frequency ... what other measurement could be used to describe the difference in sound because even though it’s the same note....same frequency, the pitch is different? Is their a measurement for that? The difference in sound between strings? I always thought that’s what I would see if I could see what you just showed me....but those two strings have the same frequencies on those frets.

This might be elementary for some but I’ve never had it explained to me correctly.

Totally a guess, but I would guess that the reason the same note on the E string say an E played at the 12th fret, sounds different than the same note played on the D string would be because of the harmonics on the strings themselves. The Low E string would produce some lower harmonics of the same fundamental as the D string just because it is capable of producing lower harmonics, while the same note on the D string would be capable of higher harmonics.

Again, just a guess from me. Anyone know for sure??

 

[Rip Van Dan]

Ekulati said:
So here’s the deal: Believe it or not, the idea of the middle A on a piano vibrating at 440 cycles-per-second is fairly new. It is not some sort of “cosmic, from the spheres” absolute, that was in the Beginning, Is now and ever shall be...oops, sorry.

Actually it was the idea of what pitch , or sound, should be A.
For whatever pitch is selected, it's frequency/wavelength is determined. Every pitch we hear no matter what we call it, it's frequency is the inherent cause of the tone and is unchanging.

Tuning to "A" above middle "C" in Baroque music with instruments of the time was done to 415Hz. Current classical groups using Baroque instruments often still do tune to "A" at 415HZ.

"A" tuning to 440HZ was standardized in America in 1936. In 1955 it was standardized internationally by the International Organization for Stanardization. The German Natural History Society recognized the 440 standard for "A" above middle "C" in 1834 after it was proposed by Johann Heinrich Scheibler, who invented the tonometer to measure pitch. So yeah, historically it's been in a number of places. But for most people who are less than 83-years old, "A" has always been 440Hz.

 

[Doug4321]

I think for those of us with neither perfect pitch nor synesthesia a color to a particular note doesn't make sense.

But certainly lower notes and minor intervals or keys are like darker or cooler colors, or correspond to those artistically or emotionally.

 

[SactoBass]

It's hardly opinion, the different shades are from specific frequency ranges:

View attachment 3264730

That is correct! And the human eye is most sensitive to the yellow band of the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's no coincidence that the sun's peak output is in the yellow wavelength band as well, which is why our eyes evolved the way they did.

When I bought my new 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser, I ordered it in their "chrome yellow" color so that other drivers would be more likely to see me. Nobody has crashed into me so far, so I guess it's working! Plus, when I walk out of a store, it's super easy for me to find my car in the sea of silver, white, and blue vehicles. (You'd have to be Stevie Wonder to miss it!)

 

[Killed_by_Death]

Yes, bright yellow is more "audible" to our eyes, just like the mids of music tones are more audible to human ears.

Apparently ALL the colors at once is actually what white looks like, so is white actually more visible to us than yellow?

 

[SactoBass]

Yes, bright yellow is more "audible" to our eyes, just like the mids of music tones are more audible to human ears.

 

[SactoBass]

Yes, bright yellow is more "audible" to our eyes, just like the mids of music tones are more audible to human ears.

Apparently ALL the colors at once is actually what white looks like, so is white actually more visible to us than yellow?

Yep, white is all of the wavelengths hitting our eyes. The only reason an object appears to our eyes as a particular color is it absorbs (and converts to heat) all of the visible wavelengths *EXCEPT* the wavelength that it reflects, and our eyes sense that particular reflected wavelength. So it stands to reason that white would indeed look brighter to our eyes than yellow. But for some reason (unbeknownst to me), the yellow "pops" more than white does. I'm guessing that white, with its array of wavelengths, dilutes the yellow (as far as our eyes' detection ability is concerned).

 

[Doug4321]

We humans have some odd associations like red is warm and blue cold, but it's just the opposite in black body radiation physics (color temperature).

I can't really associate blues with high notes. I'd go violet, blue, red, green, yellow, white up the scale. Something like that.

I had a six band eq on an amp and painted the 50hz dark blue, 150 Hz blue, then I think green yellow white through the mids and treble bands. Just to be groovy.

 

[Andy235]

I started a thread on synesthesia a few weeks ago elsewhere asking if anyone else “saw” bass lines themselves as having colors and if so, did it help in playing.

For instance, when playing bass everything I play is in colors and shapes (like line drawings) all over the fingerboard. It helps me remember sections - “Oh, it’s that light green steam engine part” or “this section is 2 red cat ears - one set of dark red tabby ears followed by the set bright red tabby ears and then there’s a grey garage slab.” (Note that these are actual examples - the first is a riff from Dream Theaters “Dance of Eternity” that I cover while the other is from a new cover I’m working on - Steve Vai’s “Fire Garden Suite - Bull Whip” - recording the vid for my channel today ).

I don’t know how colors get associated with notes or patterns and stuff but C is light green, G is medium green, F is silver and shimmers a bit, etc. (there no purple or yellow lines though, and some colors (red and green) have light and dark versions, blue is only one note F#). When the individual notes get strung together into patterns they literally become colored lines dominated by one main color but change colors with each section and resemble other things in my head - and that’s how I remember songs.

I can draw songs from the patterns line by line and know what song is what by looking at the drawings later, or see something like rooftops from British Row houses and think “Oh - that looks like the section from (whatever song)” or see a color and think “That’s from that Genesis song “One for the Vine.”

That’s how it works for me.

 

[Andy235]

while I see basslines differently, I can see their "shapes". A bass part's sound has a corresponding visual to go with it in my mind. For example, the bass part on the Clash's version of "Police and Thieves" has an entirely different shape than the bass on "I Count the Tears" by the Drifters, to take two random examples of good songs.