A Response to W. Garner’s Observations on the Relationship between Colour and Music

Leonardo, Vol. 12, pp. 218-219. Pergamon Press Ltd. 1979. Printed in Great Britain. A RESPONSE TO W. GARNER’S OBSERVATIONS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COLOUR AND MUSIC James W. Davis* As an artist involved with both painting and music and intrigued by their similarities, I take issue with the conclusion drawn by W. Garner in his essay in Leonardo on The Relationship between Colour and Music [I]. He claims that relationships can be demonstrated between sound tones and the spectrum colours ‘will not stand up to close examination’. He cites six arguments, on which I shall comment. 1. He states that a musical composition ‘can be played in 12 different keys, one for each semitone, sounding the same in all of them, except for being “higher” or “lower” in pitch. However, the “colour tune” varies very greatly according to the key.’ If a painter followed the hue scale as presented in Garner’s graph, there may be no resemblance between a musical composition and the painting. Garner restricted his discussion to colours of monochromatic light. But the ‘pitch’ of a colour is not necessarily fixed by hue alone. Colour value, saturation, transparency, the size of a coloured area and the surroundings of the area are additional variables employed by painters to represent the relative ‘pitch’ of colours in a pictorial composition. Transparency may be employed to produce an airy quality. Smallareasof onecolour surrounded by a darker area appear lighter and higher ‘pitched’than if they were viewed under the same illumination but in isolation. In music an analogy to the lattermay be found when a low is sustained and a series of higher notes is played simultaneously but in a staccato (sharply broken) manner. The graph of Garner correlating hue, passing from red through green to violet, with increasing sound frequency suggeststhe reverseof thecolour-pitch relationship that I have observed in paintings by a number of artists. I realize, however, that this is a personal view. One can associate cool colours with low sound frequencies by applying such colours to underlying shapes in a picture and warm colours with high sound frequencies by applying such colours to overlying shapes (for example, as wasdoneby Barnett Neuman in his painting ‘Concord’ (1949)). Another painter might choose warm colours for the earth (low sound frequencies)and cool colours for the sky (high sound frequencies). One can also represent the high or the low pitch of a note by the location of a coloured area high or low on the picture surface. Such a ‘high’ or ‘low’ is not generally appreciated in music in terms of fixed, physical locations but, instead, in terms of musical instruments-that is, bass registers and upper octave registers. These may be *Artist,216N. Normal, Macomb, IL 61455,U.S.A.(Received 18 Nov. 1978) played separately or simultaneously to provide contrast. Sound produced in air is a 3-dimensional phenomenon. I believe that transparent colours seen in a hologram could be associated more closelywith the spatial aspect of pitch in music than coloured paint in a conventional painting. 2. Garner states that production of a fundamental musical tone on an instrument is accompanied by harmonically compatible tone as well, while a ‘colour note [tone] does not produce any kind of compound effect’. While a colour viewed in isolation seems neither to ‘vibrate’norto produce ‘vibrations’incompatiblecolours, in paintings both may be experienced. Glazing (the overlapping of transparent hues) and modulation (the transition from one hue to another or, for a given hue, the transition in value or saturation) are two ways for producing harmonic fluctuations on a painted surface. In a musical composition there are tones and gaps between them. In a painting the gaps can be depicted as gaps between neighbouring shapes or between dominant shapesand the surroundings. The interaction between the separated shapes also can be associated with vibrations. 3. He writes, ‘Achord in music isa simultaneous blend of two or more notes [tones], each of which retains its identity to the ear. A mixture of the two or more colours gives a completely different resultant colour ....The eye cannot split a colour into its components.’ The tones in a chord may be heard separately...