Map colour on to sounds. Take the visible spectrum (which i slittle more than an octave in terms of frequencies), and map this spectrum onto the audible spectrum. A little attention will show you that strangely the visible sensations of colour proceed regularly in direct proportion to the frequency and that the audio sensation of pitch progesses with the log of the frequency. So if you map directly light to sound in proportion to frequency, you will get predominantly base notes limited to one octave and large and harmonious variations in colour are un likely to produce anything but deepthroated dissonance. There is of course no real or true way of translating colour into sound; a,d yet it is worth trying. We speak of harmonious colous schemes, as we speak of musical chords. I have mentioned two major obstacles in trying to develop such a mapping, such the ear refers to the eye and the eye confirms the ear. I would suggest two different approaches in this. 1 to map directly the interval of human perception in the two domains, visual and auditive, while taking into account mathematically the notion of one step one shade to one tone. (indeed we say tone for both colour and for notes). This requires reconfiguring the notion of frequency as non equivalent, in the two domains. 2 The second strategy might be to find the colour equivalent of the perfect fifth.?.The stepwise block from which diatonic harmonics can be built. Ideally we can imagein that it is possible to associate avery colour scheme, every combination with a complex chord..even a sunset, a forest in winter, a hoearding in the metro. The coulours are there and for those who wish them to correspond to sounds they can do so. There is no reason at all to assume that an interval which represents a percentage of our audio spectrum and can be made to correspond to an inverval which occupies the same percentage of our visual spectrum, should be a priori equally soothing, but this unlikely hypothesis is at least a starting point. Such then is the case of 1 above. The case 2 is more apealing since it does not depend upon the nature of what we have become, but seeks the pythagorean structure underlying colour. It would seem to require the visual equivalent of the pure note, that is to say that all the colours can be arranged on a scale of frequency, unambiguously. I wonder to what extent such a scale is even theoretically possible.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 21:30:47 +0000
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