Color Intervals: Applying Concepts of Musical Consonance and Dissonance to Color

Throughout the centuries there have been numerous attempts to correlate elements within the fields of music and visual art. The author compares the 12- tone musical scale to the 12- hued subtractive pigment color wheel commonly used by artists and applies the principles of consonance and dissonance in musical intervals to their counterparts in color "intervals." The main function of this paper is to put forth a paradigm that can be used by artists as a point of departure for their own explorations into the use of color as well as to create a possible method of analyzing works of art to understand why certain color combinations may work well together.