3 ms·

The most compelling use of color in music theory that I've encountered is a color scheme where individual notes are given primary colors (yellow, red, blue) lik

by pohl 2y ago

The most compelling use of color in music theory that I've encountered is a color scheme where individual notes are given primary colors (yellow, red, blue) like this: C is yellow, C#/Db is red, D is blue, D#/Eb is yellow,...etc First observation: the notes of each of the three diminished tetrads are monochromatic (their notes all have the same color.) Then, look at the major minor triads and assign them secondary colors (purple, orange, green) depending upon the colors of their constituent notes. So, for example the C major and C minor triads are both orange chords. F major and F minor triads are green chords. E minor and E major triads are green chords, etc. This is a scheme that Tom Glazebrook calls "metaharmony", and he uses it in the context of studying the Barry Harris approach to Jazz, but it's actually isomorphic to Erno Lendvai's "Axis Theory" analysis of the music of Bela Bartok. (The secondary colors correspond to the T, D, and S functions.)

karmakaze 2y ago
I think they're color-coding with the root note (or key?) being red which makes more sense than coloring the note names. Similar to how hearing perfect pitch can be a bit of an annoyance (with unnecessary detail) than useful.
- pohl 2y ago
  No, they're definitely assigning the colors to the pitch class. It's not relative to the tonic of the key. I remember that being a stumbling block for me, because I like things that are independent of key. But, no, a C major triad is most certainly orange because C is yellow, and E and G are both red. I ultimately made peace with this because the greater goal is to break you out of the key prison so you can learn to move anywhere. In this light, it makes sense to assign the colors to the pitch class.
  - karmakaze 2y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. So I suppose this is a different way than key + II/ii/etc notation where one would think of implicit key as a color and be aware of consonant/dissonant colors which are certain distances/hues from that color. I'm not really buying that we can interpret degrees of hue differences to identify which ones are consonant/dissonant when the base/reference color is changing. I would certainly expect our hue perception and usage to be absolute and not relative--vs pitch perception being mostly relative. I can't say how a certain green is 'higher' than a red by the same amount a certain blue is higher than a green. It's requiring us to develop the same intuitions we already have for pitch for hues--creating a problem rather than solving one (if I'm understanding this correctly).
    - pohl 2y ago
      > I'm not really buying that we can interpret degrees of hue differences to identify which ones are consonant/dissonant when the base/reference color is changing. That's definitely not the aim here. There's nothing here related to consonance/dissonance, and there are no variations in hues. There's just one red, one yellow, one blue, one orange, one purple, and a single green: six fixed colors altogether. So a major/minor triad that has one yellow note and two red notes is the same shade of orange as one that has two yellow notes and one red note. The utility and beauty of the colors is that the 3 primary colors — and their equal-parts mixing forms secondary colors — makes an astonishing metaphor for how individual notes mix to create base triads that have one of 3 musical functions, which correspond to the secondary colors. Then, in addition to that, the color of extension notes (which will again be primary colors) seem to make that chord "want to resolve" to chords where the base triad is the complement of that extension note's color. One can try to take the metaphor too far, but just this much is compels me. There are other interesting details, though, like all augmented triads and sus2 or sus4 triads are tri-color, which seems to align well with their functional ambiguities. If you look at the screenshot of the Tonnetz I linked to elsewhere in the thread, it seems that what we feel when we sense that we have moved from one chord-function to another (in some chord progression) actually comes from moving from one of the diagonal secondary-color "lanes" in the tonnetz to another.
pohl 2y ago
I forgot I wanted to include a couple of links: Here's a video someone made to describe the idea better than I have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjR13Jz7YYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjR13Jz7YYw Here's a screenshot of a Tonnetz I drew in SwiftUI using this color scheme: https://imgur.com/a/metaharmony-tonnetz-c-major-6th-diminished-scale-4ivHAyU https://imgur.com/a/metaharmony-tonnetz-c-major-6th-diminish...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mncharity 2y ago
Going the other way, using a sound analogy to teach color theory, I played with a {B4:red,C:orange,C#:yellow,D:green,D#:green,E:blue,F:violet} map - frequency scaling with offset. With an equalizer-like keyboard - intensity from touch location, and displayed on the key. So kbd/equalizer to synth to spectrogram to scale-and-offset to pretend-they-are-lasers to a restricted spectra to color space and color. Keyboarding color in a color space via spectra.

by pohl 2y ago

karmakaze 2y ago

I think they're color-coding with the root note (or key?) being red which makes more sense than coloring the note names. Similar to how hearing perfect pitch can be a bit of an annoyance (with unnecessary detail) than useful.

pohl 2y ago
No, they're definitely assigning the colors to the pitch class. It's not relative to the tonic of the key. I remember that being a stumbling block for me, because I like things that are independent of key. But, no, a C major triad is most certainly orange because C is yellow, and E and G are both red. I ultimately made peace with this because the greater goal is to break you out of the key prison so you can learn to move anywhere. In this light, it makes sense to assign the colors to the pitch class.
- karmakaze 2y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. So I suppose this is a different way than key + II/ii/etc notation where one would think of implicit key as a color and be aware of consonant/dissonant colors which are certain distances/hues from that color. I'm not really buying that we can interpret degrees of hue differences to identify which ones are consonant/dissonant when the base/reference color is changing. I would certainly expect our hue perception and usage to be absolute and not relative--vs pitch perception being mostly relative. I can't say how a certain green is 'higher' than a red by the same amount a certain blue is higher than a green. It's requiring us to develop the same intuitions we already have for pitch for hues--creating a problem rather than solving one (if I'm understanding this correctly).
  - pohl 2y ago
    > I'm not really buying that we can interpret degrees of hue differences to identify which ones are consonant/dissonant when the base/reference color is changing. That's definitely not the aim here. There's nothing here related to consonance/dissonance, and there are no variations in hues. There's just one red, one yellow, one blue, one orange, one purple, and a single green: six fixed colors altogether. So a major/minor triad that has one yellow note and two red notes is the same shade of orange as one that has two yellow notes and one red note. The utility and beauty of the colors is that the 3 primary colors — and their equal-parts mixing forms secondary colors — makes an astonishing metaphor for how individual notes mix to create base triads that have one of 3 musical functions, which correspond to the secondary colors. Then, in addition to that, the color of extension notes (which will again be primary colors) seem to make that chord "want to resolve" to chords where the base triad is the complement of that extension note's color. One can try to take the metaphor too far, but just this much is compels me. There are other interesting details, though, like all augmented triads and sus2 or sus4 triads are tri-color, which seems to align well with their functional ambiguities. If you look at the screenshot of the Tonnetz I linked to elsewhere in the thread, it seems that what we feel when we sense that we have moved from one chord-function to another (in some chord progression) actually comes from moving from one of the diagonal secondary-color "lanes" in the tonnetz to another.

pohl 2y ago

I forgot I wanted to include a couple of links: Here's a video someone made to describe the idea better than I have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjR13Jz7YYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjR13Jz7YYw Here's a screenshot of a Tonnetz I drew in SwiftUI using this color scheme: https://imgur.com/a/metaharmony-tonnetz-c-major-6th-diminished-scale-4ivHAyU https://imgur.com/a/metaharmony-tonnetz-c-major-6th-diminish...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mncharity 2y ago

Going the other way, using a sound analogy to teach color theory, I played with a {B4:red,C:orange,C#:yellow,D:green,D#:green,E:blue,F:violet} map - frequency scaling with offset. With an equalizer-like keyboard - intensity from touch location, and displayed on the key. So kbd/equalizer to synth to spectrogram to scale-and-offset to pretend-they-are-lasers to a restricted spectra to color space and color. Keyboarding color in a color space via spectra.