Some people, such as Louis Betrand Castel - credited to be the father of "color music," made fanciful apparatuses with which to translate music into dynamic colorful presentations. These performances were created to fill the eyes with the same feeling that one gets from listening to music.

When describing the elements of design, you tend use words which have a musical quality about them. Some of these words are direct translations from music, such as rhythm, style, harmony, and tone. Others are more implied, like balance, weight, and contrast. This correlation along with the fact that both light and sound are waves, led me to ask this question: "Is there something about certain frequencies that, when put together, become pleasing to the human spirit?" In other words, does the harmony of color and sound have a common ground? What makes certain combinations of colors or notes more pleasing to us than others? Could it be due to the harmony of the frequencies, or is it simply our culture? For who is to say what colors work together, or what notes sound right? Music in the far east is structured very differently than in the west. This is also true of color. Combinations of color that are found in places like India or Africa are very different than that of central Europe.

As you can see, this study of color and sound could get very involved. There are many variables that could be entered into the equation. To keep it simple, I focused mainly on western culture and music. I feel however, that If one were to apply these theories to other cultures, the results would be the same.

I first wanted to find the wave lengths of notes and colors to see if there was a possible proportional correlation. This proved to be rather difficult. It seems that defining a color by its dominant wave length is quite subjective, and can vary depending on what variables were used in collecting the data. This made it hard to nail down a certain frequency. I was however, able to find these frequencies in an old book called the "Dictionary of Color" by Maerz and Paul. I then compared these numbers to the frequencies of musical notes. I never actually found out for sure if you could compare millimicrons to hertz, although I was told they were both similar. Assuming this to be the case, I found that these seven colors correlated with seven out of the thirteen notes in the chromatic scale. This presented a problem. This left no notes with which to assign the tertiary colors to. From this initial data I concluded that there was no direct correlation between the notes and the colors at frequency level, and that it was more of a personal expression as to the assignment of these colors to the notes of the scale. This is shown in the chart below.

Assuming that most spectrums go from red to red, I felt that I should start my scale with red and the note corresponding to it, D sharp. From there I continued up the chromatic scale, assigning the appropriate color from the color wheel, until all thirteen notes had a color. Since the entire visual spectrum appears between these notes, and most music does not, I felt that the other notes should be assigned in this manner: The notes in the center of the keyboard, that is starting with middle C, would be the pure colors. Notes above this octaves would be tints, getting progressively lighter as the notes went higher. Likewise, the notes below this octave would be shades, getting progressively darker as the notes went lower. This method of assignment would agree well with those who feel that the deeper tones of music seem to have a dark quality, as well as the higher tones having a lighter feel to them. As for my color assignments, I feel that changing them would not have an effect on the results that I generated. The only thing that would need to be kept constant would be that the colors be kept in spectral order in relation to the chromatic key that has been chosen. For example, if it was later found out that red was in fact best represented the note C, then red-orange would be C sharp, orange would be D, orange-yellow would be D sharp, and so on.

Another way to do comparisons was to look at the scale. There are seven primary tones in the scale. (see figure 4) The tonic, subdominant, and dominant notes make up the roots for the one, four, and five chords. If you take any tonic note and look at the fourth and fifth notes above it, you will find that these colors are analogous to the tonic's complement. Also by building a major triad (a three note chord made up a perfect third and a minor third) you fin that the two notes or colors that make up the perfect third are of the same group, i.e. primary, secondary etc..., and that the third note or color which completes the triad is of a separate group.

These relationships are interesting in that they show us that the relationship between color and sound is more than just coincidence. The implications of this data are far reaching. One could use color to teach music theory, or use music to teach color theory. If that is the case, would it then not be possible to use color theory to create music, or vise-versa? Could it be possible to apply the principles of music composition to design?

I decided to take this study a step farther. I wanted to see what chords might look like. It is hard to say what shape a certain tone should be. One could use an oscilloscope or some complicated computer program to get the shape of the tone, but I chose a rectangle to keep it simple. I felt that I could change the dimensions of the rectangle to fit the note that was played. The notes duration became the X dimension, and its relative proportion to other notes being played to be the Y dimension. Now I realize that sound has more than two dimensions, but here again I wanted to keep the project simple. Translating notes into boxes could be done several ways. The first way I chose to do this was to simply have an even representation of the notes in a row. My thoughts here were that there are three notes and three colors. The problem with this is that all three notes are not heard with the same intensity. The tonic or root note is the most prominent sound, followed by the dominate or fifth. The third can barely be heard and because of this I felt they should be represented in such a manner as to illustrate this relationship. There were two ways of doing this, one was to show them overlapping each other in a manner that showed this relationship. The second way was to have them almost echo each other like a splash in a pond, the least heard note in the middle, flowing outward to the most prominent. When I actually started to translate music into color, I used a mix of all three of these. These actually turned into rules of sort, guiding the translation.