New year new enthusiasm.
Back from holidays with a few deadlines on the horizon has got me thinking.
I have been looking into the connections between colour and sound. John Gage has led me to the 17th century’s attempted to match the intervals of the musical scale with corresponding colours. However, this was problematic at the time, as Western music was moving away from away from the modes of the ancients towards an even tempered scale. Newton, Kepler and Descartes made graphical representations of the colour-sound scale where Castel made plans for an ocular harpsichord, however it seems that this machine was never built.
I’ve been thinking that I could make movies of the colours of different cultures using these colour-sound scales. I could choose pieces of music that are indicative of non-western cultures and translate them to visual movies using solid colour to represent the intervals used and use edits to represent the rhythm.
What would it look like if it was silent? Would you be able to recognise the culture from the colours?
I would need to be careful to try and be as objective as possible when choosing colours for quartertones from the colour-sound scale, and not be influenced by modern aesthetics and cultural assumptions.