PolyChromatic Music Theory I

[@luncius_]

I love it. Colored notes is the future of music notation.

[@jkrsun9218]

Nathan Kite Sadly not for synthesedes, they'd be pretty upset at colour choices 🤷‍♀️

[@moadot720]

@@jkrsun9218 1. *synesthetes 2. No, I still think it's cool, and I have synesthesia.

[@unslept_em]

I'd like to point out that a polychromatic coloring system would be difficult to properly write or read for those who are colorblind, and would pose a more serious accessibility barrier to some of those people beyond simply parsing a bunch of accidentals

[@vittoriofalco570]

5:21

[@gerardvila4685]

As a colour-blind person (red/green/grey confused) I can only agree. Industrial ergonomic rules tell you never to convey information by colour alone.

[@Zettaiz3r0]

This is absolutely genius and adaptable notation. I love the work and you have inspired me to dive into this kind of sound with researching some experimental MIDI controllers out there.

[@thestatpow5]

You have no idea how important this is. I beg for more lessons please!

[@MarioFan171]

With Rotational Polychromatics, Microtonal Music is now based on the Color Wheel instead of the Spectrum Pitch Colors, Which means the more wide than angle, the wider the interval. And please note that it uses the RGB Color Wheel so it means 3edo is the primary colors, 6edo is the secondary colors, 12edo is the tertiary colors, 24edo is the quaternary colors and 48edo is the quintiary colors. First, The Unison and the Octave starts with the color red, then the Hue Changes when you change the note. For example: A Tritone is Cyan and a Major 3rd is Green. So, No more Confusion for Sharp and Flat notes here, You can use Hue for this System. The Colors will be perfectly alligned if it's in 12n-EDO.

[@dolomuse]

That is a fascinating application of color theory to pitch! It's a beautiful intersection/integration of visual and audible qualities. My perspective is based on a scientific taxonomy of color (electromagnetic spectrum). This simpler approach was a good place to start since the ROYGBIV spectrum is fairly well known. I think Rotational Polychromatics will be a great advance in developing a more refined pitch-color system that could be applied to any micropitch scale generation method! Integrated hue, contrast, and saturation variances might further expand the applications of a polychromatic system of music.

[@luishunabamaya5654]

You are such an Inspiration. Thank you for your valuable work 🙏🏽✨

[@UlisesRockerHR]

Awesome!! Ive been waiting years for this! Thanks so much

[@Thaumas]

Genius, Dolores. I love your stuff you are a great thinker. This is the best solution to xenharmonic notation I've ever seen.

[@eduardo98ful]

Visionary!! You are inspiration Dolores

[@BenGreen1980]

I'd be really interested to just see a video on the practical process of building polychromatic chords.

[@AleksaderBogucki]

Great video, thanks! I agree that this type of notation excludes colourblind people. Moreover, playing in e.g. red light environment (on a stage) makes score unreadable. Nevertheless it is possible to choose proper colour scales that are intuitive and colourblind friendly. This colour scales are called: perceptually uniform color space, there are many good articles about them in the web. Thanks once again for interesting video!

[@geoffstockton]

I love your channel so much.

[@dominiquemanchon9914]

Very nice idea, which works best for scales which strictly includes our familiar chromatic 12edo scale: 24edo, 36edo, 72edo (my favourite one, already used by Ivan Wyschnegradsky in his "arc-en-ciel" - rainbow - for six pianos tuned with a 1/12 tone shift from one to the next). I don't however know how to make this idea work in 19edo, 31edo or 43edo.

[@dss618]

Brilliant ! Thanks ! I needed some clarity on 1/4tone usage. Now fraction up or down using 1/8tones. Never mind...... No need for that.

[@marcosdeboni7109]

Super interesting! Can't wait to see more videos about the deep explanation of the uses and maybe analisis of some of your own music and how this is applied, maybe also comparing to other systems that coexists right now. it's so exciting and fascinating!

[@wholetone4840]

Having 132 notes per octave and still notating them as being derived from one of the 7 notes of a mode works for the tradition but not for what the harmonic series actually reveals at a resolution 10 times greater than 12TET. The resolution of a tritone to a "major 3rd" is quite fine but there may be 7+ similar models that resolves to all intervals of a conventional 7 note scale. Even continuing to notate the harmonic partial of a 3rd as the 5th note of a scale, and the partial of a 5th as the 3rd note of a scale is good for tradition if you chose to stay in 12TET. But eventually, if you you're going to apply the correct math your chronological count must be based on the harmonic series because it IS the Legend. What are we burying when we fail to percieve the "circle of 5ths" as triangles and fail to percieve the "circle of 3rds" as pentagons or,... PENTAGRAMS?

[@crieverytim]

ive been using colored map stickers for years. huge game changer.

[@hk1053]

I would be interested to see how you set up your polychromatic instruments. What is required to get sound (the instrument, speaker, midi-thing?, cables?)?

[@tdubasdfg]

Your studio looks amazing and so inspirational. I'd love to visit one day!

[@jeremiahmcpadden4386]

I love the flatland reference

[@digitaldeathsquid3448]

This and the TedX talk you did a few years back have been incredibly useful introductions to polychromatic music. Out of interest, how much overlap would there be between certain notes at different colour extremes, e.g. would the note D Violet be typically sharper, flatter or roughly the same frequency as E Red?

[@tonywatson8959]

Digital Deathsquid I would like to believe that D violet would be directly underneath E FLAT red. I’m not extremely educated on this system but that’s what makes the most sense to me. Since the color system is an extension of chromaticism, the most intuitive solution would have the colors not surpass the lines of standard notes but fill the space between them to allow those tasty chords! hope this helps :)

[@dolomuse]

Great question. The polychromatic system is based on the concept of a linear color continuum rather than a color wheel. This might be because I was working with keyboards where the pitch colors are physically played from front to back. With the Tonal Plexus, I experimented with the idea of a using unique color (magenta) as an overlapping ‘enharmonic’ pitch which would duplicate the violet pitch of say ‘A’ in the magenta pitch of Bb. Then Bb red came next in the series. This was added for playing purposes more than anything else. Here is the process I use: First, select how many pitches per octave. Let’s say 33. (any microtonal scale method can be applied to the 33 pitches) Next, assign pitch colors while generally keeping the pitch color spectrum relationships - flat (red) to sharp (violet) - consistent. Because 33 is greater than 24, we’ll need 3 pitch-colors per octave.

[@wizard1370]

Thoughts on color notation from "Tall Kite". Anyone?

[@Vininn126]

Calling the song flatland, I get it. That's clever.

[@topsecret1837]

I think beyond the limits it would present to the colorblind, what you’re describing is in itself limited by the fact it does not in fact add a dimension to sheet music since all microtonal music is inherently reliant on the manipulation of pitch, which is already represented as a dimension. Obviously what that entails, without color or a degree of simplicity in understanding multiple microtonal sets, is difficulty in reading. However, polychromatism may apply better in respect to developing a system which could be reshaped as fits harmonic series and ratios. In other words, developing a way to make the vertical dimension of music continuous rather than stepped.

[@CameronWattMusic]

Really interesting video. I have a background in serialism and I'm working on some microtonal experimentation at the moment, and this colour idea is really nice. It opens up an interesting interaction between score and performer because the colours are fuzzy. I've come up with a system for generating microtonal sets wherein the organisation of pitch and intervals is based on a synthesis of Milton Babbitt and Brian Ferneyhough's rhythmic languages, and perhaps this colourful notation will come in handy. In my compositional process all of my notes are annotated with numbers to indicate the cent deviation from 12-ET, which is good for me but you can't really give a score full of numbers to a performer. Thanks for this.

[@Whatismusic123]

The music you make is not music.

[@CameronWattMusic]

@@Whatismusic123 Cry harder

[@Whatismusic123]

@@CameronWattMusic if that is your natural response to insult then you may very well be stupid and ignorant enough to make even worse music than I assumed.

[@ArthurSieg]

Very interesting, thank you!

[@HarmoniChris]

Fascinating lesson, Dolores!

[@theuberman7170]

This is insane. We are witnessing the future.

[@sarahaprincesa]

Wow 🤩

[@Unikmaen]

thank you for a motivation to learn this subject more!

[@SamTahbou]

How do we solve the issues raised by daltonism?

[@Psyhohm]

Check out the lumatone

[@portwain]

Thank you

[@Holobrine]

With microtonal music, we have the power to create just intonation in any key. 🤔

[@garbear6899]

Yes! I've been working with 53 equal temperament on a synthesizer recently, it approximates within a few cents of just intonation. A tonic, major 3rd, perfect 5th chord sounds so perfect. It's like discovering a long lost home!

[@ramiolsen]

@@garbear6899 I just got a 53 tet guitar built. Quite difficult to play, but it's gloriously satisfying to listen to...

[@garbear6899]

@@ramiolsen Awesome! My main instrument in actually guitar, would you mind sharing how you did the frets?

[@ramiolsen]

@@garbear6899 www.holzblut.de/gitarre-no90.html only local woods used. :) The fret-constant is: 1,013164143014915. Is that sufficient, or do you need more info? I can send you the spreadsheet with precise distances if you want to.

[@narcssius]

@@garbear6899 can we hear it?

[@tikaal]

Chroma means color after all

[@NeptuneatDawn]

How do you color the notes? Do you have a program or do you use colored pencil over the normal black? For equal temperaments like you showed in the video where all notes are equal this would work very well. But in just intonation (5-7 limit) notes closer to the 1/1 are much more frequent and important than others. Getting colors that are likely to appear together to be contrasting enough I would think is key. If all normal notes in JI were green, and down a comma was yellow, and up a comma was cyan, I feel like the sea of green notes with occasional cyan and yellow would not be as distinguishable as it should be. Up two commas would be blue and down two commas from the green normal set could be orange. The issue, I would think, would be that one comma up (cyan) and two commas up (blue) would be very likely to appear together and again would have discerning problems. In this context you would see only blue and cyan notes appearing together. Colors nearer to each other are harder to discern than colors far away in wave length. But in JI music that sounds coherent, colored notes with adjacent wave lengths would likely appear together in the score and visibility could be an issue. If the color green was the starting point of the 1/1 5-limit diatonic notes in 7 limit JI. And each ascending color indicated an ascending comma, you would still need some way to indicate the 7th harmonic notes and their super major second inverses from their 5 limit counterparts with the same note names and places on the staff. With using only 6- 8 colors it would not provide enough info. It seems new additional accidentals would still be needed, at least for 7th harmonic notes and their inverses and the sharp, double sharp, flat, and double flat varieties. If you could darken and brighten adjacent colors so that they could be visible clearly while next to each other, then you would only need 8 additional accidentals to the standard ones and colors. Thoughts? For me EDO's are interesting at best, but are not the future. They are more distractions from the pure harmony of JI. Finding a system that is conducive to playing and notating pure harmony is where we should look to innovate. The color thing is a good idea though, and probably works the brain and emotions in a totally new dimension while sight reading. It maybe just needs some fine tuning for practical JI purposes.

[@dolomuse]

To color the score I export the notation pages as eps, png or tif files and edit them using Affinity Designer (vector graphics software). I am approaching the notation problem from the opposite direction in that if you colorize a matrix of equally divided pitches of say, 120 pitches per octave, most JI subset scales could be very closely approximated within it. 120 pitches per octave would use 10 colors per semitone. This (120 edo) pitch matrix can notate non-equally divided, subset scales as well. Just because some pitches in a JI scale are closer together than others doesn’t necessarily mean that they would need to be written as variations of a single color (modified with hue, saturation and contrast). Also, the use of minimal, intuitive pitch modifier symbols like ↑ and ↓ could be added to further refine the value of each pitch-color within a scale. The polychromatic system is a transitional system. It radically expands the chromatic system in using it as a known 'point of departure'. But it is, at least initially, bound by conventions of the chromatic/modal system. As the ideas of pitch and interval color are further developed, the system could evolve beyond this attachment to the chromatic/modal system.

[@nylonius]

@@dolomuse Dorico supports colored noteheads, so with Dorico there would be no need for separate graphics software. While you can't assign microtuning to the colors, you can still have Dorico play back correctly from your color notation by using any accidentals you wish, and then hiding them in the final score.

[@geoffgrigg]

That was fantastic. Brilliant deductions. If you could provide your email I'll send some images that may relate to new forms of notation that reflect how nature fills space. It may be adaptive enough to work with the Chromatic and Poly Chromatic system you've described. By that I mean it encompasses standard notation, including colorised notation and adds relationships between elements using wave forms.

[@VexylObby]

I'm excited for this!!!!

[@pirsabel]

That’s a very sensible proposition, I really approve of it especially in view of interpretation! - One thing I wonder about though is if this is not a too monophonic approach - i.e., how to integrate this into an expansion of the existing theorry of harmonic analysis? - Would love if you’d comment on this!

[@dolomuse]

While the polychromatic system is based on chromatic theory and harmonic analysis, it also goes far beyond it. My background is more in jazz theory than classical analysis. From this perspective, I am exploring an expansion of micro-pitch modal and chromatic varieties in my compositions. I am also exploring the possibilities of a radically expanded tonal system of harmony. In this sense, the polychromatic system facilitates new creative possibilities, within an extended ‘micropitch-color’ approach, toward chromatic tonality, polytonality and atonality. The polychromatic system is an intuitive conceptual bridge between traditional modal/chromatic systems and very high-resolution micro-pitch scales and harmony (72, 106, 120 pitches per octave). At this early stage of exploration and application, the theory has yet to be discovered and created. My passion is more for intuitive exploration and composition rather than theory and analysis. I hope that others with these talents will create a deeper theoretical framework for the polychromatic system. In my practice, I am beginning to appreciate the polychromatic system not only as a ‘bridge’ between modal/chromatic systems and micro-pitch scales and harmony, but also as an adaptable system to carry forward to nonchromatic/nonmodal micro-pitch systems of the future. Here is a link to a recent podcast: nowandxen.libsyn.com/172-dolores-catherino

[@pirsabel]

@@dolomuse Thanks for the response!

[@harrypope2280]

This is brilliant!

[@corrompido7680]

it's quite ingeneous to use color, but it could be a problem when printing music and it's a barrier for anybody with some kind of color barrier.

[@だよさとしくん]

Oh,headquake theory! but I'm interested in.

[@hipepleful]

There are a few problems with this, however. One, what about colorblind people? Also, it looks rather unprofessional, though I do admit, this problem might just be because of how we view sheet music or something. Finally, there's the same problem we face with microtonal music, we still have to learn what each color means per piece, just like we have to learn what each new symbol means.

[@chittonglio2497]

Also concerning to improve it to a more color-blind friendly system, e.g. using shapes instead of colors

[@bazookaman1353]

I know I'm kinda necroposting but since we're using color as a numeric value and not as a qualitative value, it would be best achieved by using a number instead of a shape

[@jimmyhsp]

yes please

[@dreamprescription8852]

Wow!!!

[@RedMasking]

Hello Miss Catherino. I'm totally unlettered in musical theory. I am like Level 2 and you are Level 86 Endboss. I still got questions about music im my head for a while. Is it possible to make a composition with only primenumber-pitched notes to sound like harmony? I can't describe it better, what I mean...

[@joshbrill.musicmindfulness]

brilliant

[@stevenmayhew3944]

Now, about the colors. I can see them clearly, but as you may recall, some people are color blind. Perhaps using shades of grey for color blind musicians to achieve the same perspective.

[@Magic_Battlegrounds]

You are rad.

[@MrKite_]

Wujuuuuuuu!!!

[@Jrockten]

What about blind and color blind people? How are they supposed to use this color system?

[@dolomuse]

The colors of gray and brown could be used as substitutes for specific color perception difficulties. These substitute colors could be quickly implemented in tablet displays and with on-demand printing of the modified score.

[@thatoneweirdkid7385]

What if your colour blind?

[@hernanescudero6620]

Siiii

[@leonardoandres6545]

The future.

[@3OrMoreBones]

Rip being colorblind...

[@elaineharvey5990]

05132020 Review

[@NewGoldenAgeOfTerra]

I like the idea of abandoning reference to the Western modal system. I think what's needed is a comprehensive notational framework within which 12-EDO music can be easily notated as one of many (an infinite number of) special cases. There is music on KZbin that's nominally drawn from up to at least 1,000-EDO (a subset of the possible pitches within that scale), which provides essentially complete pitch freedom. We need a consistent way to notate all possible music without a built-in implicit bias toward any particular scale. If there were a Nobel Prize for music, whoever invents a user-friendly notation system that fits that bill should probably win it.

[@peterhudecdotcom]

Already with the 12-TET modal system, it is a pretty silly idea to use 7 names to describe it. Inventing more accidentals to force the 7 note names to all the n-TET or DED systems-none of which (except the 7-TET) are divisible by 7-is really just an extension of the primal silliness of sticking to the 7 notes when the equal temperament was invented. It’s the obsession with 7 note names that makes the rather simple 12-TET music theory (and it’s notation) so complicated and inaccessible. If they chose 12 names for the 12 tones, there wouldn’t be any need for concepts like enharmonic equivalence and key signatures which are just a consequence of the silly nomenclature and have nothing to do with the music that is being described. Also the idea that a scale must have all the 7 letters is less than helpful when dealing with scales which have more than 7 notes like the bebop, or diminished scales. I’m wondering where the obsession with the number 7 in the music community comes from, but maybe it’s really an obsession with tradition. Why, in the whole history of music theory, there were so few attempts on better, simpler systems and if they were, they were rejected? Now imagine that the clock dial was defined by musicians-an hour would mean one or two half-hours, depending when you ask. I guess there would also be sharp and flat hours. Or if mathematicians were as obsessed with tradition as musicians-we would still be using Roman numerals. With creative accidentals of course. And if we reached the limits of the notation, we could always replace accidentals with a color scheme without deviating from the tradition. P.S. Seems like using the 7 notes and accidentals to describe the the TET-96 system was a little bit too much for a certain Julián Carrillo who proposed guess what… referring to notes by their step number. I’m a bit worried whether he was not expelled from the music community after this blasphemy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/96_equal_temperament#Notation

[@The_SOB_II]

But this system has another flaw aside from being unfit for colorblind people. Close notes cannot be easily differentiated at a glance. Those are important for a lot of JI purists, but not for everyone, so this is still a great idea for some projects

[@GrimmieXII]

Perhaps adding vibrancy/saturation as a modifier to the colours as needed would add enough resolution to be able to easily tell different but close pitches apart?

[@theuberman7170]

This system is based on science.

[@General_Ictus]

In the last 5 years, accessibility has become a hot topic in music education. Any system that utilizes color this extensively is sure to fail with the vast majority of music teachers. It excludes anyone who cannot see color, or even people like myself with minor color-related visual impairment. In fact, it isn't even the first time color has been proposed for notation (check out Tantacrul's video on Notation). If you are worried about the 'wider adoption' of this notation (as the video suggests), there MUST be a symbolic representation and those symbols must be given braille counterparts.

[@zejalt8608]

It would interesting to considerate color blind people and their limitations.

[@stefika]

I’m color blind.

[@ivanbrown304]

What if your color blind 💀