Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Color/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
POINTS OF ANALOGY BETWEEN SOUND AND COLOUR
WE have already seen that there are many strong points of resemblance between colour and music, and there are others which I shall touch upon in considering further questions connected with colour; but, as we have also seen, we must not attempt to insist upon the closeness of the analogy at all points, and for the present, until we have more facts to go upon, we must suspend our judgment as to the exact extent to which it holds good.
The points of resemblance we have examined thus far may be briefly restated thus:
1. Colour and musical sounds are both produced by vibrations acting upon the nerve terminations of the eye and ear respectively.
2. Both are limited to a certain range of visible and audible vibrations, and there are certain numerical relationships in these which may or may not be of psychological significance.
3. Both are largely dependent for their common, mental, or psychological effect upon relative degrees of harmony and discord.
4. Combinations and sequences of notes or tints in both are capable of affecting us emotionally and giving us pleasure and pain.
5. Both are capable of adding interest to and deepening or lessening mental impressions received from other sources.
We have yet to consider amongst many others the following points:
(a) The musical resemblances arising when we make colour mobile and introduce the element of time into its production, or, in other words, when we make given colours and combinations of colours appear at will for a longer or shorter period.
(b) Resemblances in rhythmic compositions in music and colour.
(c) The conditions which arise when with the element of time we introduce repetition, gradation, and relatively quick or slow increases of strength and delicacy into colour.
(d) The emotional effects of mobile colour as a form of art upon us as compared with those of music.
In the first place—to return to a matter already briefly referred to—let us see how far it may help us if we use a similar scale to the musical one in designing an instrument by means of which we can produce colour somewhat in the same way as sound is produced for musical purposes.
Such an instrument should be able to produce all the simple colours, and, by combining them, almost any compound colours.
It should also enable us to place them side by side in larger or smaller quantities, or mingle them in one compound tint, and their production should as far as possible be entirely under the control of an executant as to their strength and delicacy, and the length of time they are allowed to appear upon the screen or other reflecting surface.
Several such instruments have been designed and constructed by the writer, and will be described more in detail farther on, but for the purpose of the argument let us merely assume the existence of such a means of producing colour.
Taking it for granted that we have provided suitable arrangements for producing delicate or strong passages of colour, corresponding to soft or loud passages in music, we shall find upon experiment that variations of strength in colour will produce the same kind of impression on the mind as in music, that delicate passages will have a quiet and peaceful effect, and strong and vivid ones will be more exciting.
We shall also find that we can take advantage of the influence of contrast as in music. Opposing colours can be used to make the action of each upon the eye and the mind more powerful, and partial combinations of divergent colours can be employed.
In music, a gradual or rapid increase in tone or strength—or vice versa—plays an important part in most compositions, and with our mobile colour instrument, or colour-organ, we can deal with colour in a similar way.
The faintest possible flush of colour can be made to swell into a full note or chord of great strength, and also to die away through a long succession of changes until it disappears.
A blaze of magnificent colour can be thrown upon the screen in a short sharp burst, or a few wandering notes can be made to flit across it, so delicate that we are hardly aware of their existence.
In the sister art, the gradual decrease of the intensity of musical notes has, as a rule, a pathetic effect upon the mind, whereas a rapidly increasing strength of tone has a joyful or stirring influence. That the same thing applies to colour even in nature will be generally admitted.
The gradual dying away of colour in a sunset is usually more or less pathetic, and the increase of light and splendour in a sunrise has a certain joyfulness.
If we analyse our impressions, I think we shall find that this is not merely due to the disappearance and loss of the sun in the one instance and the hope of a bright day in the other, but to the lessening of beautiful colour and its final disappearance into a cold and unsatisfying grey or the gradual increase until it blends and merges into the full strength of daylight.
Experiments in mobile colour enable us to produce similar impressions.
Then, again, in dealing with colour, with the help of our colour instrument, we cannot avoid introducing the element of time.
If we strike a single note and produce a given colour upon the screen, the length of time that colour remains there before it is succeeded by another will correspond to the length of a note in music.
If we have a series of colour notes differing as to the length of time they appear, we also have something corresponding very closely to a musical phrase, and a good deal will depend upon the way in which we balance and combine the varying duration of each colour, just as in music.
To make the matter clearer, let us take a simple sequence of colours thrown upon the screen. We will say that such a phrase consists at its opening of a pale amethyst tint lasting for a quarter of a second, succeeded by a rose colour for half a second, after which the amethyst is repeated for an eighth and develops into a strong crimson for a whole second. Another short phrase may be stated thus, in diagrammatic form, and might be paraphrased by the series of musical notes placed under it.
It is quite clear, therefore, that here we have another point of resemblance between the foundations of an art in which musical sounds are used and one devoted to changeable colour under the control of an executant. Time—used in the musical sense—is more or less common to both.
This is worth noting because it is a key to some other facts about mobile colour.
It also leads us on to one of the other points of interest already referred to.
In music, as in poetry and architecture, there is always a tendency to rhythmical repetition. Passages are frequently repeated with a slight variation, and many compositions are ended with a restatement or coda of the leading motives which have been worked out in it.
Diagram to illustrate introduction of the element of time into colour effects—the duration of the colour chords upon the screen corresponding to the musical notation.
In early poetry there are also tendencies towards repetition of ideas in echoing phrases, as, for instance, in the Psalms, and a rhyme is but a repetition of a somewhat similar sound at the end of another line.
In architecture repetition is still more formal and definite, arch repeats arch, and column echoes column, though varied perhaps in proportion or in the detail of its ornament.
We may also trace the same principle at work in the art of painting and in the pleasurable sensations we receive from nature. Intentional repetition of form with a slight alteration enters into the art of many of the great masters. It occurs again and again in the landscapes of Turner, especially in those wonderful colour dreams of his which are essentially rhythmic in their composition.
In nature it probably has much to do with our enjoyment of the inverted reflections upon the mirror-like surface of water. The beauty of the isolated stem of a silver birch, or the delicate lines of a group of reeds, is increased by their reflection in the pool of the moorland, and the campanili of Venice have an added charm when they are reversed in the wavering reflections of the lagoon.
In all these cases there is increased mental satisfaction derived from varied repetition, and we find, upon experiment, that this is also the case when we are using our mobile colour instruments, and endeavouring to produce beautiful colour sequences upon the screen. A passage of beautiful or striking colour seems to demand its echo.
Passing to the emotional effects of colour upon us, the important part that harmony and discord play in colour, as in music, has been already referred to. Much of the joy of life stands in direct relationship to the mysterious element of pain, and could not be fully felt without experience of discomfort or of suffering.
Even comedy borrows much of its joyfulness from our knowledge of tragedy, and in all great art there must be an echo of the pathetic as well as a suggestion of the pleasurable, or we feel that it is out of key with our experience of life and nature.
Here we find another peculiarity which is common to both colour and music, and which is emphasized by a further mutual characteristic.
In literature the references to pain and to pleasure and to all the gradations of feeling and experience that lie between those two extremes are more or less definite, our interest is excited by descriptions of facts which suggest either the one or the other.
In music, however, the appeal to the emotions, except when music is allied with literature, as in an opera or a song, is essentially indefinite. With a musical composition—for instance, a Beethoven symphony—every hearer may well read a different meaning into its tender, its lively or its majestic passages. It would be difficult for a member of an audience to write a description of exactly the emotions or ideas suggested to him by a musical composition; and if two or more hearers did so, no two accounts would agree. A pastoral symphony may be in a certain sense descriptive, yet its descriptiveness is of a very indefinite kind.
In a musical work between its opening notes and its last chord there is a wide emotional field within which the imagination has freedom to wander at will. There are emotional suggestions, but no definite outlines—tragedy with no precise indications of its source—joy with no definite reasons assigned for it.
Part of the great value of music to us—certainly a great deal of the pleasure it gives—is closely connected with this indefinite quality, and its inexhaustible power in brightening, strengthening, and refining our lives, and in prompting our imaginations is largely dependent upon it.
A similar indefiniteness of action upon the mind and the emotions belongs also to colour, and experiment has shown that the art of mobile colour has for a considerable number of people, even in its present forms, the same kind of emotional and stimulative power that music possesses, though appealing to another sense.
Exterior of a colour-organ.