Colour and Music.....

Colour and music play special role in our lives. Imagine, if we were living in the world without colour or music, the life would have been so dull and monotonous. Both colour and music give extra dimensions to human culture... they give personal delights to us! The joys of colours and music may come from the nature like watching the warm red colour of a sunset or listening to a bird's song. It is more likely that these joys come from a fabricated source e.g. enjoying a beautiful painting or a favourite song. But can we find any similarities between colour and music? or is there any relationship between them?

Let's take an artistic look first. We have been taught in school that the rainbow consists of 7 colours - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet; Now we know that in music we have 7 basic notes – A, B, C, D, E, F, G in Western music and Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni in Indian classical music. Different colour themes, like warm or cool colours, may be formed by using primary colours; similarly basic musical notes are used to form 'Raagas' - musical modes with different rules.

Now consider the elements of music, e.g. pitch (relative highness/lowness of tone), melody (a series of pitches in flow), harmony (simultaneous sound of 2 or more tones). These can be associated with their counterparts in Colour elements like lightness (how light/dark is the colour), chroma (saturation of the colour) and Hue (name of the colour).

Just like various colours are formed by mixing of three basic colours (red, green and blue), different 'chords' are formed by playing of some specific notes (three or more) simultaneously.

Like colour, Music is also difficult to classify. There are some broad classifications of music (Classical, Jazz, Pop, Rock, Blues, Country etc.); however these are limited as compared to the possible styles of music. Similarly categorization of infinite no. of colours is also hard. They can be broadly classified into warm and cool colours; or Reds, Greens, Blues etc.

Interestingly different names of colours are used in music - like Blues, Pink by Aerosmith, Deep Purple rock-band etc. All of us have our favourite colours and favourite music. Sometimes colours recall us a particular music; when I see any image having a blue sky, somehow it reminds me 'Lucy in the sky with dimonds' by the Beatles and 'nile-nile ambar par' of Kishor Kumar; a picture of rainbow makes me think of 'Rang de basanti' of A.R.Rahman.

According to some studies, colour could be related to musical styles depending upon the mapping of melody, harmony and rhythm to these colours. e.g. sound without melody and harmony (Speech) may be related to White (absence of any colour). Classical music can be linked to Green, Pop music to Cyan, Jazz to Purple and Rap to Red. This doesn't restrict any music to any colour strictly, but it's just an analogy.

Any colour can be compared with other colours in relation to it's lightness, chroma and hue. Likewise, any musical style can be compared to other styles with respect to pitch, melody, harmony and rhythm. Thus Pop music has melody but no complex rhythm whereas Rap contains lot of rhythm but less melody.

This resemblance of colour to music seems quite magnificent... however, there is another aspect of this comparison...

From scientific point of view, there have been many attempts - right from the age of Pythagoras, Aristotle to Leonardo Da Vinci - for searching a possible connection between colour and music. It was Isaac Newton (1675) who clearly mentioned the analogy of colour harmony with music harmony in his 'Optiks'.

The musical notes A to G were arranged around the colour wheel (which describes the rainbow) by Newton. He positioned note A between green and blue. Thus the colour spectrum is divided into seven colours corresponding to each note of a musical scale. As a consequence, light and sound were combined in the one colour-music code.




In spite of this analogy by Newton, it has been disproved by many others because of the difference between the range of frequencies of colour (light) and music (sound). Visible light covers a spectrum with frequencies between 400 terahertz and 750 terahertz, whereas the frequency range of music is from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz.

Furthermore, there are separate sound receptors in the ear for each sound frequency, thus we can distiguish between the fundamental tone and all harmonics. But colours cannot be mapped in this way with the receptors in the eye. Colours are made of all possible wavelengths across the visible spectrum. These wavelengths are reduced to 3 colour receptor outputs.

Colour is affected by it's background and surround; the same colour appears different if viewed under different lighting conditions. Musical notes are not affected by context. The musical note doesn't have significant impact if played with different combinations of instruments.

So colour and music are not “twins”.......

There is one interesting phenomenon related to colour and music. Synaesthesia, which is rare, involves the overlapping of senses e.g. people with Synaesthesia may percieve colour while listening to music. They don't have a clear division between the reception of sound and light; their brains synthesize multi-sensual responses. Some composers see notes as colours.

Some people even see the world in different colours according to mood.... piano tones could be seen as a golden mist..... an abstract musical progression may be seen as the changing traffic signal lights of red, green and blue...... soothing flute percieved as a blue sky...... guitar notes as floating green leaves on a lake-water....

Everything seems like musically colourful!!!