The "Color" of a song/instrument

[scrubs]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the "sock-full-o-dimes" approach to this problem. Just keep sock full of dimes at your listening station. If someone makes an asshat request, you smack them with the sock. Next time they make a similar request, all you need to do is look at the sock and they should get the idea...unless they are the drummer. This is similar to the handgun approach.

 

[travelin travis]

lay off the acid, cocaine, speed, & ether Travis, or should I call you Hunter S....nice avatar

now what fun would that be? actually, i've never tried ether.

did you try the experiment? i thought it was kind of fun.

 

[blueroommusic]

it was pretty interesting...although the colors overlapping each other about made me have a flashback... by the way, what part of FL do you hail from?

 

[chessrock]

That was kind of a dumb experiment.

Some of it is pretty obvious. Like you hear the sound of a snow storm, it's not a giant leap of faith to think of white. Or you hear a fart, and you think brown. Big stretch there. Hearing a pig and thinking of pink isn't exactly a leap either, when you consider that just about every cartoon or illustration of a pig is usually pink.

That experiment is just another form of word association, which is totally different from the topic of the thread, or synaesthesia.
.

 

[amethyst_fan]

Music is color...

Blueroommusic...

Refering to music in colors would be quite common in all of history up until recent pop music times. Every key in tonal music has an associated color. Most people nowadays are unaware/unable to hear which colors are which notes/keys. (Except in the classical world of course.) There have been countles symphonies written off of colors alone. The most famous color being blue (or royal blue in mozart/beethoven times) which is of course E flat.

But, while the chances that your client is in tune with that, are quite slim, if you do want to expand your awareness of musical color, it might be worth listening to some of the famous symphonies based off of color, the most blunt and obvious being Sir Arthur Bliss's set of "colour symphonies", which are spelled out as the title being the color name. It doesn't get easier than that. The likelihood that you will enjoy the music is not there, but you can get an idea of the wide open sound of blue, the more closed in and tight sound of orange, etc. Might take a few listenings...

I still agree that there is a great chance your clients don't really know what they are talking about though, haha. However if they are indeed on crack as some suggest, that would only increase the likelihood that they do know what they are talking about, since drugs have been proven to let people more easily see the patterns and/or colors in music

 

[blueroommusic]

cool...I will check it out

I've started to experiment with some of my own material, and I *think* I am starting to be able to associate colors & sound...my new album is mostly red, orange, yellow, and I'm really trying to focus those colors a bit more and bring them out...

anyhow, I'm glad I started this discussion, because I have learned a lot, and it has introduced a whole new set of tools to my repertoire..

 

[Reggie]

cool...I will check it out

I've started to experiment with some of my own material, ...

What...cooking your own meth now or something?

 

[littledog]

Refering to music in colors would be quite common in all of history up until recent pop music times. Every key in tonal music has an associated color. Most people nowadays are unaware/unable to hear which colors are which notes/keys. (Except in the classical world of course.) There have been countles symphonies written off of colors alone. The most famous color being blue (or royal blue in mozart/beethoven times) which is of course E flat.

Would you mind providing some musicological references for this? I studied classical music for many years, and have never run into this theory. The closest I've come is to have certain keys referenced as dark or warm (like Db) and others as bright (like E).

 

[amethyst_fan]

Would you mind providing some musicological references for this? I studied classical music for many years, and have never run into this theory. The closest I've come is to have certain keys referenced as dark or warm (like Db) and others as bright (like E).

Well, a fellow classical student. Of course you are right, in addition to tone colors, keys also have a brightness/darkness factor. These are based largely on the maximum high and low notes of both the tonic and dominant notes of the key, and are different depending on the instrument you are referencing.

I'd be glad to provide some musicological references for those of you interested. Keep in mind that these were all figured out long ago, before the proof that arose now exists. Mozart was a most famous example of not only having perfect pitch, but being able to identify the associated color (likely because of the perfect pitch. Of course, we all realize that each pitch has a corresponding frequency, as does each color. Well, simply the colors have much higher frequencies which we can therefor pick up by our visual senses. If you took the same frequencies, and lowered them by a multiple of octaves, they would turn into sound waves instead, and those could be classified into a pitch.

There's nothing like a good stanford paper to clear it all up. Specifying rue factors, plot analysis, and advanced calculus will clear this up for any eager learner. And just remember, if you can't identify a color by a sound, you're not a real musician!

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~craig/papers/01/icmc01-tonalc.pdf