History of the "Colour Organ"

As suspected, not only am I not the first person to have concieved of the idea of generating colour from sound, the idea has infact been around for centuries.

Colour Organs through the Ages

"Around 1742, Castel proposed the construction of a clavecin oculaire, a light-organ, as a new musical instrument which would simultaneously produce both sound and the "correct" associated color for each note."

The first point of interest for me, is that the concentration was not on the complete keyboard. Without exception, the men behind the incarnations of various colour organs through the ages have concentrated on mapping the colours to Key; C is always red for example, rather than my former idea where the lowest register was entirely represented by one colour, blending as we move up through the registers.

 




As we can see from the graphic above, no clear concensus have ever been reached for which note should fit which colour. We can also see that some pretty big names have had a shot at it, which I did not expect to see! Namely Newton & Helmholtz, two men without whom I certainly would not be sitting here writing this!

Ill save my explanations for anotherr post, but lets just say just now I have those who I can understand and those who I can't. Or perhaps it's those who's colour choices I like and dislike... hmmm. I will say this though, from a logical implementaion standpoint, Vishnogradsky's spectrum stands above the rest, simply by using the sharps as gradient keys between the whole tone colours.

Having thought about it, certainly from an accuracy standpoint, this could be a better idea for me. It is also encouraging to me that this was something of great fascination in days gone by. I can imagine in the 1700's this would have been pretty cool! There is also a trend for taking idea from the past and reinventing them for today. These were intended for beauty; if I can add accuracy to that equation then I feel I'm onto a winning idea.

"And dark and light colors do actually have effects which are comparable to low and high musical tones. Dark colors are sonorous, powerful, mightly like deep tones. But light colors, like those of the Impressionists, act, when they alone make up a whole work, with the magic of high voices: floating, light, youthful, carefree, and probably cool too." Karl Gerstner, The Forms of Color 1986.