A Conversation About How Color Theory And Music Theory Overlap

I met with a fellow lover of both color and music Ben Wakelin to discuss some of his ideas of how light and color theories might overlap more than we knew.
Here is Ben's channel that will soon have more content on the subject...
/ @colourandmusicharmony

[@raptorboss6688]

When I saw the title for this video I audibly screamed “YES” this feels like such an under explored thing

[@hannahrockstar2857]

Being a lighting designer in the music industry, this is one of the coolest videos I’ve ever watched

[@ColourAndMusicHarmony]

Hello. Ben Wakelin here. Would you be interested in emailing or talking about your ideas related to this topic? I would love to exchange ideas with someone your expertise.

[@hannahrockstar2857]

@@ColourAndMusicHarmony hey! I wouldn’t say I’m an expert quite yet as I am very fresh in the industry but I’m definitely willing to talk!

[@solgast]

For as long as I can remember, I have found this deeply natural and not strange at all. Growing up with both art, writing, animation, and drumming with indigenous roots, I keep seeing more patterns the more I variate between transitions, bridges, and different mediums. I feel like one should keep bridging their dreams to reality by being the bridge, and you will see. Earlier in life, people looked strangely at me when I said that my favorite rhythms were blue and red. But the primary colors of the Sámi national costume are red and blue, with green and yellow as additional key hues. Now, it would not surprise me if the frequency of those colors is found in the music. I can see many ways in life where people would greatly benefit from this, like color therapy and music therapy. By explaining the truths behind the connections between color and sound, we might see new ways and even more efficient approaches to medicine in some years. To show the interconnections of it all is of great importance, especially in a world torn apart. It is always fascinating and truly wonderful to see more bridges being built towards deeper understanding. I am glad if more people get to hear about this.

[@kellyglennie]

Yes I completely agree. I also wonder if this works for our other senses, can we taste blue / the corresponding chord? Is that sweet?

[@bitcharacter2824]

This video is absolutely brilliant. It's such a satisfying explanation of WHY colour theory works, instead of just the hand wavy "Here's the combinations, they work because they work".

[@azami4538]

I used to play music and pursued a full time career in cg arts since. A lot of people said I would need to re-learn things, but my response was they're fundamentally the same except represented differently. There's still rhythm, harmony, contrast, tones etc, I'm glad someone has finally covered this .

[@vg5668]

I don't know how i just now found this channel but I am so happy to have found it. Thank you for these videos they are so educative and stimulating. I absolutely love this topic and found your conversation invigorating. Thanks again

[@JimRobinson-colors]

As a past in music as a profession and now for the last 12 years as a colorist - I have made the connection many times before. I think your conversation is quite interesting except for a few misconceptions. Firstly, yes humans look for patterns. But we look for familiar patterns, or patterns that we relate to being familiar. But the analysis of frequency might be correct, when related to a color wheel. The first problem is that color wheel in the example is subtractive, not additive ( although addressed a bit later in the video) . Our eyes do use R,G,B to mix colors but they are completely relative to adding light on a black canvas. So his theory of the color wheel is completely wrong as a theory for vision. As more color is added, the result is lighter. When all three colors are combined equally, the result is white light. Although we are mixing light, even newer colorsits have trouble with this concept. It gets confusing when it relates to filmstock, because when a color needs to be redder ( for example ) the filmstock needs to have more density, and when shining a light through it - the negative has more density and it appears darker. The examples used in this video, he seems to be going in and out of visual color and paint mixing. So it is like modifying actual data to confirmation bias. Impressive that he can find 5ths and correlate them, but to me really not as impressive when you actually know color theory as it applies to light. I would put the music part of this to the same patterns that are stored in our memories and which we find pleasing or which we find dissonant that trigger discomfort because they are rarely used together. He actually thumped out a beat on his chest and said that it sounded like an animal - which triggers our memory to a sound in memory of that sound / pattern in nature. In color grading if we want our audience to feel comfortable, we make sure the memory colors are dead on, as expected for the viewers memory - so skin tones, blue sky, etc. saturation levels in shadows and use of cool colors etc. But if we want to make the audience feel a certain way, the cinematographer and/or the DP, set designers, and the colorist will push color into places where our memory is not accustomed to seeing. Cinema has done this almost since it first started, even before color was introduced. But more so when the sound and the colors were combined. So if you watch the Wizard of Oz and see the emotions and color of when the girl visits Oz as compared to the bleak mundane world of living in Kansas - color can influence the emotional connection. And for the other side of the coin. The violin striking dissonant notes for the murder in the shower in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho", is in my opinion what makes that scene most disturbing. I can just imagine what kind of emotion that provoked the first time an audience saw and heard that image and sound together. Was waiting for the "Teal and Orange" reference. Kind of glad that wasn't mentioned though, but it is the epitome of color swatch in Hollywood.

[@kellyglennie]

Thank you

[@OmegaFalcon]

I LOVE the idea of merging color and music theory together, I've been interested in this kinda concept for a couple years now. While I do object heavily to your methodology here, that color wheel music visualizer is a sick idea and I wanna try coding a proper one! On another note, my dive into really understanding color science has left me feeling like color is a damn MESS and probably not truly analogous to music

[@ValfreyjaAndTheHarp]

I'm a synaesthete and this topic is very interesting to me. Fun video, thank you!

[@lilydabug]

So the synesthetes really do have something going… For real though, this is mind-blowing. I love it. There are so many parallels in nature and the way the brain processes things it’s amazing. This is a wonderful new way to look at color

[@odysseyonawhim]

knew someone would mention them haha

[@agastyasfz]

also fun to me is how a major triad, if you shift the third down (aka take your yellow/green closer to orange), you get the color palette of twilight-sky-and-streetlights-candlelight, and also a “darker” sounding chord

[@jordancooper7663]

There’s a chapter called “Pythagorean theory of music and color” in Manly P. hall’s book Secret teachings of all ages. Worth checking out. Also Russian painter Nicholas Roerich -I read something about his paintings being “frozen songs”

[@kellyglennie]

Thank you

[@davidleach9381]

So excited every time you post something. Thank you ❤

[@gavinpeters9531]

always interested to see more about this. I come from the music side, and am exploring how to "properly" map sound to color, in terms of audiovisual performance. Most audiovisual stuff is "oh this look cool, match it to the beat/etc"... but I ended up doing a similar thing.. map the visible spectrum to the harmonic series.

[@coltonjohnson9739]

Please make more content about this! That’s so cool!! I’d love to see a painting with colors using this concept. I learned music first And I’m learning painting now, but it’s so fascinating. Certain chords have very distinct emotional feelings that help me pick them out by ear. A major 7th feels very wistful or bittersweet nostalgically to me- I wonder if the notes for a major 7th (1, major 3, 5, major 7) would look nostalgic? Probably not, but super interesting. The other thing I’m curious about- most of my ear training centered around relationships between chords in a key, like Roman numeral analysis. I wonder if anything interesting could be done with that And color. So cool!

[@shanyeung6291]

I don't know what to say except that this is beyond fascinating

[@RK-rb2jr]

This video is incredibly interesting. I have always wondered why purple and red are adjacent on the color wheel despite being far apart in terms of wavelength. I had thought that it might be similar to music, where violet approaches an octave of red, making them fit together. You could even create a 3D spiral color wheel representing all frequencies. Although we can't see all the octaves, they would likely resemble the colors we already perceive. One thing that differs, in my opinion, is the analogy between chords and colors. A major chord is essentially the first overtones combined. The combination of red, green, and blue does not feel harmonious to me; it feels more like a blend of everything. Additionally, those colors combine to form white or black. The adjusted color wheel is quite smart and interesting. An automatic one that follows musical principles would be incredible. However, comparing it to music, the complementary colors on the adjusted wheel and the fifths don't seem to make much of a difference in combination. In music, the tritone and the fifth represent a significant difference. Generally, neighboring colors blend well, whereas minor seconds in music are quite dissonant. Your flower analogy supports this idea. If color fifths worked like musical fifths, they would blend rather than stand out. Another difference is that most people can differentiate colors more easily than sounds, excluding those with perfect pitch, which leads to a very distinct perception of colors and color combinations. I also wonder what it would be like to see in as many frequencies as we hear, with overtone structures and timbre similar to sound. It would be so fascinating to have a program that translates music into videos and vice versa. Another question/problem involves representing sounds on a screen and determining where to place them in a two- or three-dimensional space. Thanks a lot for this talk!🙏 I'd love to see more!

[@agastyasfz]

you asked for reference so i’d highlight my own video Ouranos and sorta-also- Demeter, they’re attempts at visualizing 100% (or as close as possible) of the sounds playing at any time. trying to formalize synesthesia in a similar way as was discussed here. i’m less focused on color/pitch, and more on rhythm/motion but i wouldn’t be surprised if i ended up using a bunch of Ben’s theory along the way ! this episode was infuriating to listen to in that i wish i’d thought of it all first. really excellent stuff guys

[@ekaruna42]

Love this so much, it’s really fascinating! In the past I have idly thought about similarities between music and colour and how one could be used as a metaphor for the other (e.g. a musical key is like a colour palette, the music’s octave range is the painting’s value range, the dynamic range is the saturation range…) and could be it makes sense because of this!

[@CompilerHack]

I feel if instead of taking 7:4(1.75) you take the Major seventh ratio which is iirc is 5:3 then you will surely end up at purple which is like 1.67 and maybe we just won't have to fill up the fuchsia hues? (also if the denominator is 3, you'll have a reason to use 12 colours instead of 16, and 12 is like a nice number.. there's 12 tones)

[@ColourAndMusicHarmony]

Thank you. The reason I did 16 is because the harmonic series splits in 2,4,8 and then 16.I then did a scale of 12 to fit music. 12 is actually a musical compromise that doesn’t fit into the harmonic series. But is pleasing for the circle of fifths and tuning purposes.

[@CaptainSamuelVimesBootsTheory]

Wonder how synesthesia plays into this

[@agastyasfz]

trust me i’m working on it

[@villacomic]

Fascinating! So inspired to explore light. I’m an architectural lighting designer with some exploration in light art with color. This is perspective is amazing ✨👏✨✨

[@helenjohnson7583]

I need to share this with my favorite art teacher.

[@hermancharlesserrano1489]

musicians/artists know it’s all about the intervals, wherever you choose to start in a colour wheel/ circle of 5ths/4ths; the intervals dictate the emotion

[@wiktoriatluvi]

Such a great video! I love "speculations" like this 😊 I think it might be interesting to see whether there is a bigger percentage in people with the kind of synesthesia that connects sounds with vision perceive the colors and sounds similarily to the connections that would make sense in the way you are showing them :))

[@annap214]

Amazing! I would like to use those color combinations in my painting!

[@GiorgosZacharioudakisgiozaha]

Thank you for this insightful video!!

[@jordancooper7663]

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes” -I think this is why a color multiplied won’t give you what u expect, because it’s not repeating the cycle and returning to the same place on the wheel, it’s going an octave higher.

[@spaderkungskuk]

Many display drivers / screens have their own color transform automatically applied. This video will not have the same colors on an iPad as on a pc, so whatever pretty is shown, the viewers will say Oh yes it’s true so nice, but they all see different color wheels 😊 Color spaces will modify the colors away from what was “wavelength” selected. Some programs have a Raw transform as option, but the screen is out of their control. Are you using the CIE 1931 color space? Or are you actually adding a hue offset and not a wavelength? I don’t see that a hue or frequency shift in entered wavelength has enough significance unless the color space is defined. Really interesting video though. Another approach would be to mix Wavelengths, transformed by the CIE profile, where each wavelength serves as an overtone added to the base. That would make a color chord. And do those have the same harmonics as musical chords? However, The human ear receives vibrations, and there can be physical eigenvalues. The eye receptors probably don’t interfere in that way, so I think a pretty color palette is 100% cultural reference though.

[@adnelvstad8656]

All of this is very interesting. My challenge is the color wheel. Which one do you choose? Itten? Chevraul? Newton? Goethe? As all the primary colours are different. And aren’t the colours organised in a spectrum? They definitely do not meet in violet! But if you accept Goethe’s spectrum in the middle and no colour wheel - then the colours find it’s complementary in the other spectrum more like on an organ or piano?

[@alisonarmstrong8421]

Look at the linear row of visible light from red to Violet; off to the far left is infrared and off into hues we cannot see at all and off to the far right is ultraviolet and further into hues we cannot see and then the vibrations become sound/tones... See John Gage's books, including Colour and Culture.

[@Marysart]

For books, you might try Quadrivium, by John Martineau, although you might already know that one, also goethe wrote a book on colour theory. That's just what came to mind. Thank you for this talk.

[@user-qy2kw9kx3o]

I do know someone on KZbin who is talking about colour and harmonics and that is Ella Ray. She is a colour analyst and has a very distinctive approach that uses physics and eastern principles of energy and harmony.

[@PohlLongsine]

I gravitate towards explorations of the parallels between music and color. This one is fantastic. I wanted to mention a different approach that I also find compelling, because it uses the concept of mixing colors to a limited, but useful extent: it's called Metaharmony. The idea is simple: assign individual notes one of the three primary colors like this: A is yellow, Bb is red, B is blue, C is yellow, Db is red, D is blue, Eb is yellow...etc. Now give all possible major and minor triads a secondary color (Purple, Green, Orange) based on the mixing of the colors of its notes. For example, the C major triad has yellow and red notes in it, so let's call it an orange triad. Turns out the C minor triad is also orange. In fact, the major & minor triads with the same root note are always the same color. So the G major and G minor triads are purple. The D major and D minor triads are green, etc. What's interesting about coloring the notes & triads this way is that the secondary colors map to the idea of a chord's "function" (tonic, subdominant, dominant). It's fun to play with.

[@CompilerHack]

This is such a cool idea/observation

[@DumDumDaear]

Yall need to tag Björk immediately

[@feelfreefpv]

I'm not sure how this would be useful for colors. It really shows how we really try to see patterns though, and how we try to apply patterns we are familiar with to other fields in a way that seems to make sense. What he says about music being so complex than colors is a good example on how everything we learn a lot about has much more depth than we first thought. He just hasn't made it as much when it comes to colors. Or is it just me haven't done it with music?

[@wiktoriatluvi]

Yes, only this bit kind of bothered me, there is SO much to know about colors, they just might seem shallow if you don't dive deeper into the subject

[@lemonke8132]

well color and sound are both frequency so it makes sense to analyze it under the same mathematical lens, aka the realm of how these frequencies are multiples of one another/can harmonize

[@feelfreefpv]

@@lemonke8132 Yes, but when it comes to colors for example two green colors, without such a relationship, can go very well together in a picture. Or if you want complementary colors it doesn't matter if they have an exact frequency shift between them. That's not the case at all with musical tones, where a slight shift sounds horrible.

[@lemonke8132]

@@feelfreefpv true, i suppose musical tones are experienced simultaneously, whereas since colors don't overlap in space, they aren't experienced in the same way

[@feelfreefpv]

@@lemonke8132 Yes, we experience them in very different ways. Same thing with volume compared to saturation. At first they might seem to have something in common but when you think about it a little more you find they are completely different qualities of completely different things. Amusing to compare as a thaught experiment but I don't think there is any meaningful theory coming out of it.

[@parafuegosarchive]

Im surprised this video made me feel like taking my time to learn about chords will save me time when painting something

[@prodmorningstar]

Ive been wondering about this type a thing for a while, never put any more thought into it because I thought that it could maybe be a reach and they’re just different.

[@harrydelport6220]

Apparently the circle of fifths reflects frequency relationships within the colour wheel.

[@sethdossett1304]

yeah can we create a program that can play these color relations with any song, or does that already exist? I would love to see my favorite chord progressions and see if I like that color palette as well.

[@neelumahendra4695]

I think what he is saying is ……. When he says music. …. It is like what we call “ values” in color. ……. fascinating. 11:48

[@Diane_McDon]

Fascinating!

[@sewoh100]

Now I want to see a color wheel where you can plug in any music interval to get a color palette.

[@crystalcritchleyart]

If I was a mathematician it would be interesting to see if the math for Fibonacci sequence correlates with this in selecting the colours based on the “golden rule” for a painting depending on which colour you want to be dominant

[@Eternal-ReTuning]

You're talking about the death ratio characteristic of finite life systems.. There is more than this deviant mathematics in nature.

[@villacomic]

Ideas after this video: Translate sound to colour with this “alphabet” translator. Made an instrument with light, touch an sound.

[@sobeso]

wow by the time you get to @33:15 my mind is blown away

[@feelfreefpv]

I think it's just a product of him trying to find patterns in colors in a way he is familiar with. The color wheel could as well have been devided into 8 or 20 sections.

[@agastyasfz]

@@feelfreefpvskeptical of “it could have been any other way” because there were likely hundreds of temperament traditions that were tried at various times that didn’t make it the idiom “let the cat out of the bag” has likely gone through many variations (“let the dog/hedgehog/fish out of the cage/box/pond”) but for some reason, cats and bags were selected as the best way to describe a secret. i feel like most traditions (especially those that are hundreds+ of years old) go through an artificial selection process. there *have* been five legged chairs, they just didn’t make it very far. my favorite intuition for this is picturing a horse. if you make the horse even a little longer, or a little taller, it suddenly *feels* like it wouldn’t move as fast/fluidly. adding even a few inches to any one dimension and suddenly it would look ridiculous at a gallop. it would need to change the entire way it runs! there’s something very *not* arbitrary about those proportions, and lots of long horses died out along the way. anyway. i’ve spent a long time wondering about the idea you brought up and felt like sharing some considerations

[@feelfreefpv]

@@agastyasfz When he talks about the red and blue the brittish flag and super man came to his mind. But those have quite different colors than the ones on the screen and also from one another. So to me it's clear that he really tries to stretch things to fit his idea. He also have this argument that certain intervalls go well togeather as in music, but then late in the video he shows some color combinations in those intervalls that just screams wrong like dissonant tones (like at 40:38). Those colors may be used for contrast, not for harmony.

[@agastyasfz]

@@feelfreefpv at the same time i agree with everything you just said as well. i was addressing something slightly different

[@ColourAndMusicHarmony]

I enjoyed your critique. I’m interested by your statement ‘Those colors may be used for contrast, not for harmony.‘ Can you elaborate on it?

[@josephvelocci2567]

I feel like you could also map saturation to dynamics and really complete the picture

[@ColourAndMusicHarmony]

Exactly what I was thinking!!!

[@rexis188]

1.5 (blue) x 1.5 = 2.25 (green?) I don't get why he said that would make yellow 27:47

[@ijidau]

I'm not sure either. He mentions dropping an octave, which is an important aspect, but he never does share the maths (spreadsheet) which would clarify this I think.

[@Okbodhitreetard]

700nm (#ff0000) / 1.5 = 468nm (#00a0ff) Pythagoras did 1.5*1.5=2.25/2 (octaves are in 1:2 ratio) = 1.125 700nm / 1.125 = 622nm (#ff6f00 light orange) Of course, this represents C-G-D which is not a chord harmony. The major 3rd of C is E, which is in fact 1.25x the frequency (1.248x). 700nm / 1.25 = 561nm (#dbff00 slightly greenish yellow) The human eye can see up to 780nm before it hits infrared, so the colors will come out a little different depending on where you decide "1" is... in my examples, 1 is 700nm bright red.

[@ash-uq5cq]

super cool

[@bwm999]

Have you published the details of this? The colour values and the relationships you have discovered. Very interested.

[@ColourAndMusicHarmony]

Hello. Ben Here. Not yet. This is the first outing of this idea on the internet. I will be putting some things on my KZbin channel soon. : )

[@bwm999]

@@ColourAndMusicHarmony it seems like this could be used to evolve the colour wheel into a more nuanced “colour scale”. The obvious applications for interior design to put together a harmonic group of colours based on a fundamental root is interesting, but even more interesting is the possible applications for animation & cinematography. Does a minor third change the mood of a scene for example? Does adding a dynamic light as a 9th add tension which can be resolved back to harmony… Does dynamic light moving from discord to harmony create a playful free mood, using the technique of jazz. I can’t imagine it all translates quite as simply but extremely interesting areas for research. As with music theory, it could provide a language to explain & compare, and perhaps it can be a tool. Although rightly there will always be artists who are guided purely by feel.

[@ColourAndMusicHarmony]

I love your thinking. All your thoughts are stuff I’ve been thinking about too. @@bwm999

[@mariialyschyk1634]

Musicians who wrote music for the game "GRIS" used synesthesia research for this game. Each level has its own color-meaning and sound harmony that reflects pallet. You can hear about it in this video (30:20): kzbin.info/www/bejne/qJ_NfIeoftqebbM&ab_channel=ACMSIGCHI

[@shao7414]

Same way we can gather music visuals and language perfume …

[@raptorboss6688]

20:30 do you know which website that might be? I am very curious to try it out for myself.

[@ColourAndMusicHarmony]

Would be interested to see what you come up with. I wonder if you arrive at the same conclusions.

[@user-ps6yv3tw4t]

Wow😮

[@ytreza9894]

Interesting discussion, but it's very flawed, I'm sorry to say it in a kinda mean tone. I urge you to read more on the topic, the science of colors, what is actually color, before speculating on things you only know very superficially. You assume that colors are only defined by a wavelength. This is only true for a small subset - the spectral colors. You assume there is something fundamental about red, blue, green. But the cones response functions in our eyes are very broad and can't be associated with specific spectral colors. RGB is a convenient numerical model, but the colors we use for the screens, red, blue, green, are defined by convention (and technical limitations). We can actually perceive colors beyond the RGB gamut (and we can paint some of those) - but they don't fit in your theory. The animations around 35:00 are pretty convincing... until you realise ANY combination of two colors on the wheel would look nice. Especially since "nice" is ill-defined. You qualify the few cases that don't work that well as "interesting"... Strong confirmation bias there! What about adjacent colors? Don't they work well together as well? But according to the music analogy they should strongly clash. Experienced artists know that any color combination can work well in the right context. What matters the most is to use a limited palette and balance saturation and value. Hue is very secondary. Color harmony is also highly subjective and culture-dependent, much more than music. This was demonstrated by psychological studies. It suggests there is really nothing fundamental about color harmonies. Hope it helps - I don't mean to discourage. Otherwise love the channel, which I discovered recently.

[@gordonsmith33]

These colors taste like music

[@Fwoppy808]

people should really be taught the 12 RGB colors 1. Red 2. Orange 3. Yellow 4. Chartreuse 5. Green 6. Spring Green 7. Cyan 8. Azure 9. Blue 10. Violet 11. Magenta 12. Rose

[@sewoh100]

I think its less about the colors themselves but the interval between the colors.

[@Sleezy.Design]

I think everybody who has taken a psychedelic substance can relate

[@jordancooper7663]

Anyone know if we can use AI to convert melody into color palette?