Art & Technology
- Synaesthesia

Picabia's work "music is like painting" comes across as a seriously funny take on the European tradition of colour music. Not only is the title an ironic reversal, giving painting precedence over music, but Picabia unashamedly plagiarized a common scientific chart (above, right), showing the effects of a magnetic field on alpha, beta and gamma particles. The result seems to lampoon the pretensions of Enlightenment colour-music codes, and mock their intellectual credibility.


Illustration 9 : "MUSIC IS LIKE PAINTING." Francis Picabia, 1913-17.

Picabia's work "music is like painting" comes across as a seriously funny take on the European tradition of colour music. Not only is the title an ironic reversal, giving painting precedence over music, but Picabia unashamedly plagiarized a common scientific chart (above, right), showing the effects of a magnetic field on alpha, beta and gamma particles. The result seems to lampoon the pretensions of Enlightenment colour-music codes, and mock their intellectual credibility.
Only when we know the artist counted Busoni, an arranger of Bach's music, among his composer friends, do we begin to realize that - funnily enough - he might be serious. Of the many statements the Dadaist painter made connecting colour with music, none is more cryptic than: "We tend towards the White considered as a psychic entity or, in order to concretize this tendency thanks to immutable rapports of colour and music, we tend towards 'la' pure = 435 vibrations." We are seemingly being told, in the best occult tradition of colour music, that white and the note A have a physical correspondence and represent, in different forms, the same mystical goal.

   It is the tempered scale, further rationalized, that we have inherited today. Modern keyboards, both acoustic and electric, employ a basic method of tuning called equal temperament, whereby the octave is evenly divided into twelve semitones by a logarithmic progression. The octave (an interval between two notes of the same name, created by doubling the frequency of the lower note) is the only remaining aspect of Western music that might be said to accord with natural laws. The bottom A on the piano has its frequency doubled seven times over, producing a cycle of seven octaves, from A to A, before the end of the keyboard is reached. This man-made construct gives us a mathematical and homogeneous system for organising sound into music across the audible range.
   Music has evolved over millennia, through many compromises, to a relatively 'impure' state, and its contrived formulae are not echoed in the natural phenomena of the spectrum. Neither can any unifying principle be meaningfully divined from the separate vibrations of light and sound: disparities between them are clear and fundamental. To connect pitch and colour by a relationship of frequencies would require a formula so convoluted as to be ridiculous - not that this has stopped many from trying. Helmholtz noted one mid-19th century example, that raised Pythagorean ratios to the power of six-sevenths in order to match notes with colours, but rightly pointed out that such a process made arithmetic nonsense of the original musical proportions.

   Helmholtz realized Newton's alignment of the spectrum to a musical system was physically preposterous. Still, in the spirit of the times, he toyed with its aesthetic possibilities; he claimed unnamed Italian painters had preferred his favourite primaries of red, green and blue and hoped to find musical support for this thesis. But he had to admit the spectrum of light contains no equivalent of the basic musical octave, let alone the intervals within it. A comparable light octave might be envisaged by doubling the lowest red frequency, but doing so takes one immediately beyond the range of visible light. The spectrum, from red to violet, can barely span three-quarters of one such 'colour octave', let alone encompass the cycles of octaves used in music.
   Newton's optics went some way to provide a consensual model of the spectrum, but his colour-music analogy of ROYGBIV was no more than a pretty conceit. But the search for an overarching unity of colour and music continued, and even today parallels are being drawn with pure and spectral light. There are those that still marvel to discover that frequencies of certain notes, when doubled forty times over, can fall within the measurable range of visible light. In some quarters, the size of the spectrum has been exaggerated beyond the range of average vision (personal testimony included as proof), to create a colour octave. Naive or cynical, such conjuring tricks with dimensions have taken hold in New Age movements, being used to justify nefarious correspondences under the venerable name of Helmholtz's pupil, Hertz.

   The musical possibilities of ROYGBIV were explored as early as 1734, with limited success, by Louis-Bertrand Castel. His ocular harpsichord displayed coloured strips of paper whenever notes were struck. Castel had at first hailed Newton as his inspiration (with passing reference to the previous colour music theories of Athanasius Kircher), and his original colours formed a spectral array. But by 1740, Castel was using natural colouring materials arranged in a twelve-hued colour circle, and aligned to a twelve-note chromatic scale cycling over many octaves. Encouraged by the composer Rameau, Castel embraced a triadic theory of harmony that gave the primary colours blue, yellow and red the note values C, E and G, making up the common chord of C major, the white-note scale. The spectral order of the primaries was reversed to place blue at the bottom, where its expressive capabilities could best represent the musical ground-base, so important to the theories of Rameau.
   It was not until the end of the 18th century, when subjective colour effects were attracting scientific attention, that interest in practical connections between colour and music re-emerged. After repeating Newton's experiments with colour discs, Count Rumford ruminated on the possibility of:

   So Castel's instrument, despite its imperfect realization, became a de facto ancestor to the many colour organs that began to appear in 19th century - culminating in Scriabin's tastiera per luce, designed for his 1911 premiere of "Prometheus: a poem of fire", but dispensed with due to technical difficulties with primitive electrical equipment. This work is the only major orchestral piece to include a scored part for colour, but it is rarely performed. Scriabin's colour-music code employed an approximately spectral array of colours, but aligned them to a cycle of fifths rather than the simple note progression of a scale. Like other Theosophists, Scriabin tried to link moods (and even smells) to the colours and notes - C with red and human will; G with orange and creative play ; D with yellow and joy; A with green and matter; E with blue and dreams, and so on. Scriabin's arrangement was pompous and obscure, as muddy as Castel's, and it too never caught on. When "Prometheus" was given its New York debut in 1915, a colour organ (based on A. Wallace Rimington's patented instrument) provided the light component. Unfortunately, light did not flood an auditorium filled with white-clad figures, as Scriabin had envisaged, and who is to know but the colours themselves were not rearranged, in accord with Rimington's own Newtonian code (a fairly straightforward spectral progression up the C scale).

Illustration 10 : "MUSIC." Luigi Russolo, 1911.

 

Though he joined the Futurists as a militant painter, Russolo soon turned his attention to music. He created a range of novel instruments, called intonarumori, and published "The Art of Noises" in 1916. His concerts were attended by the musical and artistic elite of Europe, as well as the press and rowdy Dada protesters. Russolo's concert career was curtailed by talking pictures in the 1930s, and he turned to studying folk music and Eastern mysticism (unlike many other Futurists, he avoided joining the Fascisti). By trying to break down the distinction between musical sound and everyday noise, in exploiting the secondary vibrations of his instruments, Russolo prefigured the concrete music of the 1950s. His legacy remains in computer music, where his notation system is still used.
Russolo's painting might suggest a belief in correspondences of colour to music. The clearest clue is provided in a manifesto on "The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells", by his comrade Carlo Carrą: - "...rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut, greeeeeeeeeeeens that screeeeeeam, yellows, as violent as can be." Other Futurists, the brothers Ginna and Corra, committed themselves to a spectral colour-music code inspired by their Theosophical beliefs. Bruno Corra's "Abstract Cinema-Chromatic Music" provides an intriguing account of the techniques the brothers used, employing the code first on a colour piano then translating the effects to film in 1910-12.

   Richard Wagner put out the call for a Gesamtkunstwerk in 1850, a new kind of theatre that would synthesize music, verse and staging into a unified, total artwork. His Beyreuth playhouse introduced the wedge-shaped amphitheatre, hidden orchestra and darkened auditorium, to which audiences are now accustomed. With the introduction of arc lighting (and incandescent globes soon after), theatrical illusion was near complete. Loie Fuller, the Parisian dancer, put these effects to good use, timing her movements in response to atmospheric lighting. Wafting diaphanous veils under ever-changing coloured lights, she inspired Toulouse-Lautrec and D. W. Griffith and influenced Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham. Other were also effected by the Wagnerian spirit. Kandinsky wrote stage pieces from 1909 to exemplify the new values: "The Yellow Sound", "Black and White" and "Violet" , employed the colours themselves, in motion to music, as the central characters. Unfortunately, his works proved too difficult to mount. Around the same time, Schoenberg composed "The Lucky Hand", to be accompanied by a range of colours according to no known theory:

   Of course, he did have theories, primarily the twelve-tone system that used the chromatic scale as its fundamental unit. The ancient Greeks had developed the scale of semitones to supply nuances, or musical colouring, unavailable with the diatonic and enharmonic scales. (The musical term 'chromatic' had crossed over into painting in the 17th century, along with 'harmony'.) Wagner introduced greater colour to orchestration and melody by including chromatic variations beyond the scope of orthodox classical forms. Schoenberg, the painter and composer, sought to order the cacophony that could result from excessive chromaticism: in "The Lucky Hand", musical chromatics and visual chroma seemed intended to meet.

   The technical ingenuity of the late 19th century gave rise to a number of colour music instruments, like Rimington's or Bainbridge Bishop's (the latter being displayed by P. T. Barnum). Typically, they took the form of a standard organ console with a screen above it, onto which different colours were projected - usually a standard spectrum was divided into a progression to match the C scale. Colour musicians often justified their work with references to science, spirituality and the grand order of nature, while the press shared their enthusiasm for a potentially revolutionary new art form. The musical component of colour music was frequently eclipsed by the novelty of colour music instruments. Thomas Wilfred, sponsored by prominent Theosophists, had devised large spectacles in New York in 1916; he later invented the Clavilux, his light organ, to perform Lumia concerts. By 1930, he had put the Home Clavilux on the market. Before the advent of television, a buyer could install a cabinet in the corner of the living room that silently generated visual imagery for days - without producing the same pattern twice.
   After World War I, some film-makers had turned their attention to colour music as an ideal subject for abstract animations. Sometimes, they might collaborate with an artist (Viking Eggerling with Hans Richter) or work with a colour organist (Oskar Fischinger with Alexander Laszlo). Their valuable innovations were often obscured by later advances in mainstream film - the advent of talkies and colour films - and public attention diverted to bowdlerized versions of colour music, such as Disney's "Fantasia".
   Not until the rock shows of the 1960s and 70s did colour music regain a large audience, with psychedelic performances synthesizing light and sound. Pioneering work in electronics and computing enabled animators to participate in major films as well - John Whitney's contribution to the Stargate Corridor sequence in "2001: A Space Odyssey" being one example. The effort to co-ordinate colour and music on domestic computers has led to further software advances. In exploring possible interrelationship of colour and music, programmers have been obliged to analyse anew the formal elements, to map flexible links between any arrangements of pitch, colour, shape, movement and so on. Video makers and live performers have been able to take advantage of the broad theories supplied by traditional colour music. Even something of its persistent mysticism has been readily assimilated in the age of multimedia. Modern computing and animation experts can (and often do) claim a lineage that extends back through colour organists and animators of the early 20th century, to Castel's Ocular Harpsichord in the 18th century - even unto Athanasius Kircher's magic lanterns and Arca Musarithmica (mechanically-composed music) of 1600.