7/31/2019 The Color of Music by Ken Davies

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The Color of Music by Ken Davies

Music, like color, is not easily categorized. Broad musicalclassifications including: Jazz, Blues, Rap, Classical, HeavyMetal, Celtic, Pop, Rock, Country, Easy Listening, Muzak, and so

forth - provide only a simple description for a vast variety ofexpressionistic styles.

Musical styles can also be associated with color, texture, andflavor. Think of the Blues, purple Jazz, white noise, and otherdescriptive attributes such as: dark, light, gray, raspy, sweet,sour, sharp, harmonious and disharmonious.

Music can also be described in terms ofmelody, harmony, andrhythm, with different musical compositions placing differentemphasis on each of the three musical elements. Coincidentally,color too can be described in terms of elements, or primaries,where the three primaries cyan, magenta, and yellow, mixed in

combination with white define a visible color space.

The COLORCUBE, a recent invention designed to help visualizecolor relationships within the three dimensional color space, alsocan be used as a visualization tool in mapping thecolor ofmusic.

To understand this concept, first envision a cube made up ofsmaller cubes, each one a distinct color. Starting with white inone corner, there are three directions of movement within thecube. In the one direction you add cyan, in the other you addmagenta, and the third direction you add yellow. In terms of

geographic directions, as you move through the COLORCUBEaway from white, you can either move north/south, east/west, orup/down.

Any color within the COLORCUBE can now be defined as someunique combination of each of the three primaries. Light brown is100% yellow, 50% cyan, and 25% magenta. Chromatic green is100% yellow, 100% cyan, and 0% magenta. The absence of coloris white. All three primaries in equal combination yield black. Inother words, a particular color can be categorized by where it liesin the color space in relation to the other colors.

Relating this back to music, if we were to map meand harmony onto cyan, magenta, and yellow witCOLORCUBE, we could then talk about music incolor, and describe the relationship between diffemusic as differences in color within a three dimenframework.

For example, sound without melody, harmony, orknown as white noise. Speech, or the sound of stakes on the equal attributes of melody, rhythm aextends along the gray line within the interior of thCOLORCUBE. Chimes, which are harmonious, wrhythm, map to the color yellow. Classical music,harmony, but without the hard driving rhythm of rappropriately green in color. Pop music, with lotswithout complicated rhythm or harmony is cyan inmelody with hard driving rhythm gives you the Blulots of rhythm, some melody, and some harmony,predominantly purple in color. Rap music, with lotsome harmony, but little melody, is red in color. Asong with lots of rhythm, harmony and melody, aBlack Music, Man!

This is not meant to infer that all Classical music iall Jazz is purple. Celtic music, for example, is alarge differences in melodic, rhythmic and harmoMapping the various flavors of Celtic music to colcolor space provides a second classification indetype of music it is. Two different songs within a pamusic can then be compared as being greener,the other, or being too yellow or too magenta, o

Music, like color, if categorized in terms of melodrhythm, can be described in relation to other musidifferences in color by mapping it to a three dimebased on color space. This method of categorizatto describe differences between music within, anvarious musical genres, in a way that enhancesintuitively understood by those who love and enjo

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