What Is the Color of the Tone?

© 1999 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 227–228, 1999 227 EXTENDED ABSTRACT The following abstract is a summary of the thesis “Ist C = Rot? Eine Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte zum Problem der wechselseitigen Beziehung zwischen Ton und Farbe. Von Aristoteles bis Goethe” (1996), written by the author. Abstracts in this section of Leonardo are published on the recommendation of members of the Leonardo Editorial Board or the Leonardo Staff. To receive the full thesis, contact the author. WHAT IS THE COLOR OF THE TONE? Jörg Jewanski (musicologist), Hesslerstr. 13, 59065 Hamm, Germany. E-Mail: . Translated by Pervez Mirza. Received 29 December 1997. Accepted for publication by Roger F. Malina. This text is part of the Leonardo special project on Synesthesia, edited by Jack Ox. Synesthesia is the phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sense modality gives rise to a sensation in another sense modality; for example, some synesthetes see colors when they hear music. This special section is devoted to the exploration of the nature and history of this phenomenon, as well as the discussion of intersense relationships, artworks and experiences. The ancient Greeks were the first to construct a seven-degree color scale. This scale corresponded to the seventone musical scale, and all the colors used were derived from mixtures of black and white. Aristotle related the consonant quality of tone-intervals to colors. His writings were an important part of education in the Middle Ages, and his color theory remained valid up to the seventeenth century. This can also be said about the unifying principle of all-embracing harmony, which was developed in antiquity and was based on numbers. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, musical proportions and tone-intervals were brought into various forms of relationship to colors. This was analogous to other heterogeneous phenomena such as the elements, the planets, different levels of development in science, different phases of age, etc. The aim of all this was to establish a harmony of colors and—on an overall level—a world harmony. It was, however, first with the writings of the French André Félibien in 1666 that yellow-red-blue was established as a color scheme. At the same time, Isaac Newton in Great Britain was carrying out his first experiments with prisms and detecting relationships between the tone-intervals and widths of colors occurring within the Dorian scale. One can almost sense his obligation to cosmological thought when relationships between colors, tones and planets seemed to become so apparent. The relationship between tone-intervals and colors seemed to be justified by the laws of physics and furthermore to be supported by Newton’s authority. The reception of his Opticks (1704) was substantial in Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia. In each of these countries, a scheme of relationship between colors and sounds developed. The most intensive discussion took place in France. From 1722 onwards, the writings of Jean Philippe Rameau set up a new starting point in the field of musical theory. He pointed out that the single chord was the actual center of the harmonic system and that all musical phenomena were an outcome of the overtone scale. Louis-Bertrand Castel, a French mathematician and philosopher, took over Rameau’s theory and went a step further. Castel, who had studied the new color theory and who was very knowledgeable as far as the writings of antiquity and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were concerned, developed his own color-tone system with the starting point Do = blue. (Do because it is the first note of the C-major scale, blue because it is the first color that arises from black.) He adopted the color theories of the dyers and painters and rejected Newton’s point of view, which was highly conditioned by physics. Castel reduced the color-tone interval to a colortone relationship. He freed it from the cosmological context, striving at the same time toward a conception of art in the sense of color-music. He constructed a Clavecin oculaire (= ocular harpsichord, color organ), which was probably meant to display colors that corresponded to the tones being played. Pressure on a key opened a shaft to a colored light. Simultaneous with...