Update: Music to Color project
So we just started learning about waves in AP Physics (again, AP Physics is following me everywhere).
And I was struck dumb by something my teacher said.
He was explaining how Newton discovered the visible color spectrum by using a prism to split white light into the color spectrum that we all know. The interesting part is that the reasoning that Newton used to split that spectrum into specific colors - what we now recognize as ROYGBIV - was pretty arbitrary. Up until then, most cultures had split the colors that they saw in day-to-day life into simple reds, yellows, blues, etc., but Newton split the spectrum specifically into seven colors.
But... why, Newton?
Why did Newton split the color spectrum into seven colors? It's a pretty arbitrary number. I'm all for having a red and a yellow and a green and a blue, but what's the use of indigo?
The reason, as my teacher proceeded to explain, was that Newton believed that there should be seven colors in order to correspond to the seven notes in the solfege scale.
Strange, huh?
Strange as it is, that little tidbit of information gave me a eureka moment.
If you read my post about the movie Her, you'll know that I've been trying to figure out how to translate emotion and music into art. And, regardless of whether Newton's reasons for splitting the color spectrum into the now well-known seven color scale are true, I think I just found a way to do just that.
If each color in the color scale corresponds to a note on the solfege scale, I could technically convert any and every song into a series of colors!!
My mind was so blown by this revelation that I spaced out for a bit, and 'came to' to find my teacher asking if I was okay - I sit in the front row, and apparently I had gasped loudly and proceeded to gaze blankly at the board with my mouth gaping wide open for about a minute.
So that's exciting!
I finally figured out a possible method to translate music into color (my original idea was to get in touch with a girl a my school who has chromesthesia, the type of synesthesia in which the person sees color whenever they hear specific sounds. But that method would've been very subjective and not entirely consistent, so this might work better).
The only problem I find with this method is that it won't exactly convey emotion in the way I want it to.
It depends on how I decide to execute each piece, of course.
The most basic way would be to convert each song into solfege, figure out which colors correspond to which notes, and then make a pattern with the colors that I get. There's an artist that already does something like this - Tim Bavington. In his paintings, each bar of color corresponds to a specific note in the song he's translating, and the width of the bars of color correspond to the length that the notes are held.
That method is cool, but I want to do something more involved. I'm going to have to troubleshoot and go through sketches and ideas, but I think I want to translate each song into the solfege, then into color, and from there I can build up a basic color scheme for each painting. The amount that each note gets played/sung in the song will dictate how much of that corresponding color I can use. And the image that I'll be painting for each song could connect to whatever the song is about.... maybe?
These are all just ideas for now, but I'm excited to start troubleshooting and figuring out how it could work!
Until next time :P
