Folk Music is Not Brown!

August 29, 2006 9:43 PM

Colour Player: at last, you can organize your music by its color.
posted by signal (12 comments total)

via information aesthetics.
posted by signal at 9:49 PM on August 29, 2006

Goddamn this is weird. I was in the process of preparing a post on music to color synesthesia. I hadn't seen your source prior, but it's interesting. Thanks, and stay out of my brain.
posted by boo_radley at 10:00 PM on August 29, 2006

No one has tagged anything brown here yet.
posted by tellurian at 10:21 PM on August 29, 2006

Here's a color/music related post from a few days back.

And I'd say folk music is green. Probably depends on what folk you're talking about, though...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:23 PM on August 29, 2006

So, Monochrome would be filed under lightslategray or grisaille?
posted by rinkjustice at 10:48 PM on August 29, 2006

OK, here we go: where do we file these bands?

Big Black
Black Flag
Black Francis
Black Oak Arkansas
Black Sabbath
Blondie
Blue Nile
Blue Oyster Cult
Brownsville Station
Deep Purple
Golden Earring
Green Day
Joan Jett and The Blackhearts
King Crimson
Pink Floyd
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Simply Red
Golden Palominos
White Lion
White Stripes
Whitesnake
White Zombie
Yello
posted by flapjax at midnite at 12:16 AM on August 30, 2006

The funny thing about synesthesia is that it's never quite the same experience for any two people. I can't tell you what color a song is but I might be able to tell you what color an individual note is, though I work much better going from visual to sound than vice versa. (Comes in handy. I can hear a traffic light change even if it's only in my peripheral vision.)

If they could write a program that plays music composed only of red notes, then I'd be there, but I can't really categorize a song.

More practically, I could use a piece of software that tells me what frequency corresponds to the color a peach that will be ripe in three days. It would save me a fortune in produce that goes overripe before I get to it.
posted by djlynch at 12:46 AM on August 30, 2006

"Colour Player is the result of a study into how we associate music with different colours. It turns out that most of us are able to create, with explanation, a strong link between a piece of music we are listening to and a specific colour."
[...]
"What matters is that you can create patterns in your mind mapping similar ranges of colours to similar pieces of music. Try it out yourself. It isn't that hard!"


If you have synesthesia, then yes, I agree it's probably not hard. I, however, do not have synesthesia, and I take issue with the assertion that most people can associate music with colours. Oddly enough, I associate music with sound.
posted by salmacis at 1:29 AM on August 30, 2006

I wouldn't say that I associate music with colors, but I would say that specific colors and feelings do come to mind during "deep listening." (if that makes any sense)

However, settling on one specific color for a particular song may be difficult. I find some of my favorite songs have a "build up and release" style that you could very well designate as two distinct colors. Regardless, I'm looking forward to toying around with this later.
posted by Dr-Baa at 6:26 AM on August 30, 2006

what color an individual note is

There is some evidence that color is as or more strongly associated with the vowel sounds: eee is bright, ooo is darker.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:40 AM on August 30, 2006

I have very strong associations of particular subgenres of dance music with particular colors (and sometimes patterns of colors). I think that has much to do with the particular record label design aesthetics of the different genres, though.
posted by empath at 8:58 AM on August 30, 2006

Rimbaud's assignment of colors to the vowels is said to correspond to the colored letters of an alphabet toy popular during his childhood.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:00 AM on August 30, 2006