Related Research
Previous research has been done in the area of color/music correlation. This section describes four different studies or research articles in this area.
Color/Music Combinations
At the University of Dayton, Ohio, 135 undergraduate students participated in a study on preferences of color and music. They were shown different colored lights while listening to different piano pieces. The objective of the study was to assess whether combinations of color and music can affect a person's experience.
Previously known is that people report imagining colors while listening to music, and that these colors are associated with attributes of the music. Alexander Scriabin even included a part for "light organ" in his symphony "Prometheus." When a note was played on this device, instead of hearing a tone, the audience would see a particular hue. Pitches were linked to hues according to a scheme devised by the composer. The organ projected colored lights on a screen while the symphony was being played and the intensity of the lights changed to reflect melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic aspects in the music (Peacock 1985).
The 135 participants' task was to rank the lights according to how well they "matched" the music. Their preferences differed depending on whether the music was in a major or minor key. The participants' links are what might be expected: sounds that are loud and high in pitch tend to correlate with bright colors and sound that are soft and have a low pitch tend to correlate with darker colors.
Results from the study indicated that for major-key pieces, yellow and green were preferred over red and blue; and for minor-key pieces, green was preferred over all the other colors. Differences from this study to prior studies may be due to differences in the methodology of the experiments.
Color Music: Visual Color Notation for Musical Expression
In this article by Michael Poast, a system of musical expression that uses color and shape in conjunction with sound to form a new language is discussed. The relationship of sound and color has been around since the time of Aristotle. Many famous composers have recognized color as a tool of expression for musical notation.
Colors have musical meaning, according to Poast. Color experiments have shown that colors can have a physical and emotional affect on us. One particular test from the book The Luscher Color Test notes that red, for example, is stimulating to the nervous system, increases blood pressure and increases the heart rate. Red is a "heavy" weight color. If one could associate this color with sound, red could be depicted as a pulsating rhythm. An example of this can be seen in Figure 5 and Figure 7 for experiments done with the Pop and Techno genres of music. Red has a high percentage of use in each of these. Both of these genres of music have a more stimulating and pulsating rhythm.
Blue evokes different feelings depending upon whether it is light or dark. According to Poast, some hues of blue are associated with higher-pitched, flowing rhythms. An example of this holds true in experiments conducted for Jazz/Big Band and Classical music genres shown in Figure 1 and Figure 9.
In the 1960s and 1970s, electronic music and poetry from Fluxus artists included visual scores that helped lead to many multimedia art forms. We now have diverse sensory stimulation in film, video, multimedia, television and computers.
Composers throughout history have used color and sound. A color organ was built in 1934 by Louis-Bernard Castel. The instrument was played by pressing down on a keyboard, which put a combination of colored lights onto a screen.
In reference to Color Music, Michael Poast poetically states, "In our current era, we are weaving together complex expressions of our world. Our thinking and perceiving has broadened. In this increasingly visual society and intersensorial culture, it is a timely moment for the redefinition of notational systems."
A Comparative Study of Color Association with Music at Various Age Levels
The purpose of Robert Cutietta and Kelly Haggerty's study was to explore the development of the associations of color with music. 1256 subjects, ranging in age from 3 to 78, were asked to listen to three music excerpts and indicate the color they associated with each. The excerpts consisted of three different classical pieces, each with unique and contrasting musical qualities.
The first piece, from Gustav Holst's Suite No. 1 in E-Flat, was majestic and energetic. The second piece, from Modest Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, was slower and more laborious, and the third piece, from Music for the Royal Fireworks by George Frederic Handel, was light and lively.
Subjects were given six possible color choices to choose from. After age nine, the results were very consistent. Across the generations, the color choices tended towards red, orange, and yellow for the first piece. Blue was the favored color for the second piece, and for the third piece orange, yellow and green were all chosen, with yellow standing out the strongest. These results strongly support the existence of musical color associations.
The researchers sought to answer the question of how musical color associations form. Are people experientially conditioned by the entertainment and media industry to associate certain colors with certain musical styles? When the study showed that even senior citizens, who grew up without television, chose colors consistent with the choices of other age groups, the idea of experiential conditioning was rejected. Cutietta and Haggerty concluded that color associations to music must be the result of "some sort of sensory processing of music that appears to be widespread and consistent across a wide age spectrum."
What is the Color of that Music Performance?
In an article by Roberto Bresin, an experiment is conducted in which color is used to express emotions. The main goal of this experiment is to develop a computer system for teaching students to play expressively.
To rate each performance, colors were used with the hue, saturation, and brightness scheme where the hue is the actual color, saturation is the purity and brightness of the color is a percentage.
Each subject was instructed to rate each piece of music according to how well it matched a color palette given by the computer. Participants could listen to the piece of music for as long as they wanted and then rate it with the color sliders.
Significant correlations were found for the brightness of color and in the expressive performances that included love, pride, tenderness, contentment, sadness and fear. Another significant finding was the relationship between saturation, anger and shame.
For the saxophone and guitar, darker versions of the colors red, orange, blue and violet were preferred. Brighter versions of the same colors were preferred for the piano.
Music and art had a strong correlation with each other in this study. The purpose was "to investigate if these differences could be explained in terms of expressive contents of music performances and consequently if we could use color as one indicator of expressivity in music performance."
A key part of the study was that individuals were not subjected to the music or the emotions that were being rated. Results showed "signi?cant correlations were found for brightness and the expressive performances performed with love, pride, tenderness, contentment, sadness and fear."
Discussion
The above studies illustrate evidence for definite correlations between music and color. Although their methods vary, the common thread is that all of the studies asked participants to associate a color or colors with a piece of music. They did this either by showing colors and asking subjects to rate those colors according to how well they match the music, or by asking participants to choose a color that matches the music.
Research has not been conducted that allows subjects to freely paint or draw while listening to music and to choose colors as a spontaneous part of that experience. Our research team wanted to expand on the above studies by asking subjects to actually create art while listening to music. We wanted to, rather than asking subjects to consciously choose colors, watch the color choices they made in the creative process.
We then wanted to compare these colors with colors that other participants chose in a separate survey, one very similar to the above study by Cutietta and Haggerty.
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