Color Organs

Teun Lucassen
Human Media Interaction University of Twente, the Netherlands

t.lucassen@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
The color organ is a musical instrument which produces visual stimuli such that it corresponds to the sound in a certain manner. Numerous attempts are known to have listeners experience synaesthetic eects. In these eects stimuli in one organ of sense are experienced in another. Several great names in history, such as Plato, Pythagoras and Aristotle have already been working on music-color correspondence. Since the 17th century, a number of attempts have been taken to design and build devices which could simultaneously produce color and music. This paper gives an overview of the various creations of the past and describes a personal exercise to create a new color organ using modern techniques and color-music principles of the past.

when a stimulus in one organ of sense is experienced in another organ [30]. The most common type of synaesthesia is Audition Colore, where subjects experience colors in music or consoe nants. People experience these synaesthetic eects in various degrees. Some might actually see colored panes in the air when hearing music, while others only have an inner feeling about a color. One out of twenty people has natural synaesthetic capabilities, which means that they do not need a device such as a color organ to map colors to music (in the Audition Colore variant). It has however often e been proven to be hard to show these abilities in a repeatable, signicant manner [30]. A simple self-test to investigate whether one is sensitive to synaesthesia is available on [29]. Research on synaesthesia has kept mankind fascinated for centuries. It can basically be divided into two approaches: the artistic approach and the psychological approach. The artistic approach uses art forms such as music to investigate synaesthesia. The color organ has played a big role in this investigation. It can be seen as a real life implementation of the ideas of direct correspondence between color and music. Other genres of art have also been used to exploit the eects. A well-known example is the gesamtkunstwerke in which multiple fashions of art have been merged to try and stimulate multiple organs of sense to achieve synaesthetic eects. The concept of gesamtkunstwerke was introduced by Richard Wagner in the 19th century [25]. In the psychological approach statistical analyses have been used very often to try to nd a direct relationship between for example consonants and colors [30]. The results were often unsatisfactory. Attempts to dierentiate synaesthetics from people without these experiences through PET scans of the brain have also failed so far. It has been noticed that emotional responses to parallel auditive and visual stimuli are highly individual, also when measured by EEG scans [10]. A plausible theory to explain why people sometimes have synaesthetic experiences is the Unity Thesis [30]. This states that all ve organs of sense can be seen as parts of one integrated organ of sense, instead of ve completely autonomic functioning systems (Modularity Thesis). This principle is shown in Figure 1. In the Unity Thesis the synaesthetic effects can be explained by accidental mental associations. In

1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 The Color Organ

A color organ can be dened as an instrument which is able to simultaneously produce color and music. The produced colors are based on the music by a certain mapping. Some mappings, such as a direct color-note correspondence, are rather straight forward. Others are less well-dened, such as colors which are based on the type of instrument or other musical features. The term originates from 1895, where it was introduced by Alexander Wallace Rimington [23, 15, 20]. Before this date, several attempts to create devices which simultaneously produce color and sound had been taken. Even before the introduction of the organ as we know it, people were working on such devices, for example based on clavecimbles. This is the reason why in this paper, the term is stretched slightly. It would be a shame to disregard instruments which are strictly no organs, since the principles of relating sound to music are often very similar.

1.2

Synaesthesia

The primary goal of a color organ is to make listeners experience synaesthetic eects. A synaesthetic reaction occurs

Figure 1: Unity Thesis versus Modularity Thesis the Modularity Thesis [30] it is much harder to explain these eects since the various organs are not interconnected.

2.

EARLY APPROACHES TO COLOR MUSIC MAPPING

Pythagoras [11, 17] introduced harmony in music as we know it today by dening intervals between musical notes and grouping them into octaves. The next logical step in his eyes was to link the rainbow spectrum of colors directly to his new theory. However, in those days mechanics were not advanced enough yet to actually create machinery to produce lights based on music. In fact, it would take up to the end op the 16th century until such an apparatus would be invented. The work of Pythagoras was basically repeated by the famous philosopher Aristotle [17], who once stated:

Figure 2: Chinese Alchemy Body Relations

3. 17TH AND 18TH CENTURY 3.1 Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo was a painter in the late 16th century. Although he is known to have produced only seventeen paintings, with just as much genuine replicas, he was very inuential in his time. Arcimboldo was the rst to actually build an instrument which produced light and music simultaneously. Remarkably, it was not his main goal to build such a device for public performances. Its main purpose was to aid in his experiments with music and colors. To do so, Arcimboldo convinced a musician of the court of Rudolf the second in Prague to attach painted pieces of paper to the jacks of his harpsichord. When a key was pressed, the corresponding piece of paper was shown. In principle, the rst color instrument was born, apart from one detail: The pieces of paper did not show any color. The principles of Arcimboldos color-music correspondence were based on the mathematical scales proposed by Pythagoras. For each note, Arcimboldo calculated the corresponding color according to its brightness. Unfortunately, his knowledge about mathematical scales on the brightness of colors, was not sucient yet when the color harpsichord was build, so Arcimboldo used a gray scale instead. Low notes were light, where high notes were darker. The correspondence between the notes in two octaves and the various tints of gray are displayed in gure 3.

Given that some re-create the world through gures and colors, and others through sound, in the arts as well, all of us re-create by means of rhythm, dialogue, and harmony, and these or those separately or mingled [27].

He believed in the direct correspondence between musical notes and the rainbow color spectrum. It is remarkable to see how many important gures in history have touched the subject of color music. Besides Pythagoras and Aristotle, great names like Da Vinci, Goethe and Newton [17] were more than interested in the subject. Newton wrote the well known book Opticks about the color-music relationship [13]. They all tried to make a one-to-one mapping between notes and colors, mostly based on the principles suggested by Pythagoras. He believed that everything in the world consisted of numbers, so tones could be translated to numbers and then to colors. Color-music relations were investigated long before Pythagoras and Aristotle. Chinese alchemy even dates back to the 4th century BC [12, 17]. Figure 2 shows the relation between parts of the body, color and musical notes [12]. The Chinese were known to relate many observations, like body parts, colors, music and other senses to each other. Direct connections with sense of smell and taste were also made. Other cultures in ancient times were also known for their own interpretations of the combination of color and music. Several physicians including Persian, Greek and Indian [17] worked on this subject.

Figure 3: Gray scale-Note correspondence of Arcimboldo

Later, Arcimboldo did propose a scale using colors. In his opinion the bass notes were to be connected to white, the tenors to green, the quintus to blue, the altus to gray and the superius to brown. A gradually decreasing luminance is still seen as the notes become higher. This note-color correspondence was remarkably dierent from the more common rainbow spectrum. Arcimboldo used the harpsichord for his experiments without the intention to perform for audiences with it. This means that not much is known about the eect it had on people and the general opinion on his work in his time.

listeners or viewers in any way. This was however not the last time that people would hear from the ocular harpsichord. In 1757, an unknown associate of Castel published Explanation of the ocular harpsichord. It was basically a new interpretation of Castels work. The description of the implementation was quite detailed, even mentioning the exact dimensions of the device which could be placed on top of a normal harpsichord. One mayor difference with Castels version was the new note-color correspondence, now using the theories of Newton. The success of this version was quite doubtable, regarding the authors own written comments on the cover of the publication, which showed he was insecure about the results himself. In 1743 Johann Gottlob Krger published a paper in which u he had severe criticism on Castels ideas. Castels ideas of correspondence between colors and music were only based on melodical aspects (the order in which the notes are played), disregarding the harmony (the combination of notes). Furthermore, the correspondence was not a physical analogy, but completely psychological. Despite that, he did copy a lot of his work in his proposal for an implementation. He used beams created by a combination of candles, hollow mirrors and lenses to project circles and half circles on a screen. There is no evidence at all that anyone ever tried to build the instrument. In later publications Krger never mentioned u Castel again, emphasizing on the use of Newtons theories. Another device using the basically the same techniques as Castel was later introduced by Karl von Eckartshausen [14]. He used cylinders lled with chemical uids to create colors. They were lit from the back using wax candles, which were exposed when the corresponding key was struck. Von Eckartshausen had given credit to the invention of Castel.

3.2

Castel

In 1725, Louis-Bertrand Castel [20, 17, 7] introduced the Clavecin pour les yeux which could be translated to Ocular Harpsichord. It was a proposal for a harpsichord with 60 colored panes attached to the notes of the keyboard. Castel became a Jesuit monk when he was 15 years old. He was very interested in mathematics and physics and later he taught colleges in a wide spread of subjects. His motivation for the introduction of the ocular harpsichord was that both musical notes and colors are created by vibrations. He suggested that since notes could be arranged in some order to be accepted as an art form (music), the same applies to colors. Castel did not base his motivation on the light theories of Newton, which were common in those days, but on his Jesuit predecessor Athanasius Kircher. Several other analogies between light and color were also pointed out by Castel, such as the fact they both reect on panes and they both can be concentrated by a hollow mirror. The initial instrument was not a great success. Some people however were very enthusiastic about it, such as M. Rondet. He actually gave detailed advise in the construction issues of the device. Castel would not work on the project for ten years, but his interest never faded. In 1734 Castel performed a series of systematic experiments to determine the precise analogy between color and light. He was successful in nding various relations in these two, all based on the assumption of equality based on vibrations. The rst actual model of the ocular harpsichord was nished on December 21th , 1734. What happened with Castel after the creation of the rst prototype is largely unknown. It is however clear that he kept working on the theories on color and music and the improvement of his device. The straw to perfection was very hard on Castel. In his development he constantly faced nancial problems and technical implementation issues. However, people who saw the work-in-project were mostly very enthusiastic about it. In 1755 Castel reported that he had performed on stage for 50 people, which kept demanding encores. On January 1st he would have performed for 200 people, ending in a very big applause. The device was now powered by approximately 100 candles. Two years later, Castel died. His memoirs state that the last version of the ocular harpsichord was not even a sketch of the intended product. It did not satisfy

4. 4.1

19TH CENTURY - WW1 Bainbridge Bishop

The rst actual color instrument based on an organ was build even before the name Color Organ was introduced. It was Bainbridge Bishop who started studies on the implementation of a color organ in 1875. He wrote about his work in a short paper titled Harmony of Light [3]. His device was placed in front of a sunny window or an electric light, which used colored glass panes projected the desired color on a screen. The correct glass panes where opened using shutters attached to the keyboard. Bishop used the direct note-color correspondence displayed in Figure 4. By using the rainbow scale, it is loosely based on Newton theories. The bass note was used as a background color for the higher notes to be projected on. The high notes were divided into three bows, representing three rainbows, each with the colors proposed in the score in Figure 4. In his paper Bishop tells the story where he walked outside in the rain and he saw an amazing spectacle of a rainbow with a reddish glow behind it in the sky. The colors he saw were exactly the ones his color organ uses in certain chords. From this moment on he was convinced about the quality of his instrument and his choice of the relation between colors and notes.

school of color music in London. Rimington however kept his status of the patron of color music after his death. Many later implementations of organs were still (partly) based on his theories. He most certainly got people interested in the concept of color and music.

4.3

Preston Millar

Figure 4: Color-Note correspondence of Bainbridge Bishop

In 1911, composer Alexander Scriabin [22] wanted to perform a color-music piece called Prometheus, The Poem of Fire. According to some reviews, the color part of the performance did not work due to a machine failure [20]. Scriabin wanted to perform this piece with the usage of colors at all costs, so a second attempt to create a color organ to produce colors along to the music was taken. Preston Millar, a specialist in electrical lighting who worked at the Modest Altschuler, was contacted to supervise the project which would nally result in an instrument called the Chromola. Twelve dierently colored lights were operated by a keyboard of 15 keys (the rst three lights were repeated on the remaining keys). No specic color-music mapping was created for this device, since the only goal was to serve the wish of Scriabin to accompany his music with light. Scriabin had created a special score to play the colors along with the music. The mapping that he used was entirely based on his own feelings. The initial performance using the Chromola was not a big success. The audience was not impressed by the projection of the colors on a small screen in front of the musicians. Later, the small screen was replaced by a few white curtains, which moved in the wind generated by some fans at a small distance. If this setup would have been used initially, the project might have been a much bigger success. However, this color organ has stated the beginning of a large number of attempts to create such devices.

4.2

Alexander Wallace Rimington

Although Bainbridge Bishop introduced a color instrument based on an organ, the term Color Organ was rst introduced by Alexander Wallace Rimington [23, 15, 17]. He is seen as the patron for color music since the beginning of the 20th century. Electricity was becoming available to the public and Rimington showed them what could be done with it. In contrary to earlier attempts to create such an instrument, Rimingtons device in principle did not use a direct colornote correspondence. Instead he used two keyboards, one to play the music and one to play colors. It was however possible to set up the device in such a way that the rainbow scale was mapped to the notes. Rimingtons theories were based on the same principles as for example those of Castel, namely that both music and colors are created by vibrations. People have dierent nerve endings for these stimuli, but when both of them are stimulated at the same wavelength, this would intensify the experience as intended by the original composer. The theories Rimington used to match colors on music were rather vague. For example the blast of a trumpet would give a intense orange color. When the violins start the screen is pulsating with pale lemon. This shows that the determination of which color to play on a specic note is mostly done by the performer, mostly Rimington himself. Rimington build the device in his own home, consuming over 150 amps of electricity. All this power was used to lighten the arc lamps, which switched colors by lters in various color dyes. Rimington had planned a grand public demonstration in 1914, to get people enthusiastic about color music. By that time however, World War I had started and this performance never took place. He had performed to the public before, in a very dark room. Everyone was asked to wear white clothes, to enrich the experience of the colors. By the end of World War I, Alexander Wallace Rimington had already passed away. It is said that if he would have lived into the 1920s, he would have had started his own

4.4

Visual Music

In the rst two decades of the 20th century, many artists, mostly painters, tried to take advantage of a newly introduced technique: lm. The result was mostly abstract, moving shapes and colors, often directly painted on lm stock. This new art genre is often referred to as Visual Music since the similarities between music and colors suggested by earlier studies on this subject is quite obvious in these paintings. A well-known example is Rythme Color [17] by Leopold e Survage [21]. His paintings were never actually caught on lm. At the time the paintings were nished, World War I had started. Later, his paintings were sold separately, making the actual creation of a movie even harder. In gure 5 an example of a painting in this series is given.

4.5

Vladimir Baranoff Rossin

Up until the 1910s, color organs only used colors to enhance the synaesthestetic eect on the listening and visual senses. The rst to introduced patterns and shapes into a color organ was the Russian Vladimir Barano Rossin [24]. His e device was for the rst time based on a modern piano, thus called the Optophonic Piano.

a theoretical text on color-light-music theories called Farblichtmusik. The theories were brought into practice in a series of performances across Europe. His device consisted of a few switches above his piano, controlling a few projection lights and a slide projector lightning the stage above the piano. When the rst reviews arrived, the main remark was that the projections were too simple. It was in a completely dierent league than the Chopin-like complexity of the piano music. In those days Oskar Fischinger was experimenting with abstract lms. Alexander Laszlo contacted him to help improve his performance. Multiple extra slide projectors and overlapping projection lights were added to increase the complexity and the number of possible colors. This resulted in a great visual spectacle which completely turned the reviews over [17]. Both Laszlo and Fischinger have taken the show on tour successfully.

Figure 5: Rythme Color by Survage e Rossins piano used a beam of light projected on a white e screen. A couple of lenses with colors, forms and patterns on them created a completely new experience. Not only were the colors changing over time, the shapes and patterns were also constantly transforming as they were rotated and moved. Figure 6 gives an example of a used lter, called a Disque Optophonique.

5. WW1-WW2 5.1 Mary Hallock-Greenewalt

It was quite a shock when the rst woman appeared in the eld of color music in 1918. Mary Hallock-Greenewalt [20, 17] was a soloist on the piano and had a great concert career. She wanted to create a device to control the lightning of the concert hall while performing. To do so, Hallock-Greenewalt invented a notation for the control of the lights, based on the normal music score. No direct note-color links were used because she was convinced that this relationship was variable, dependent on factors like the ability and temperament of a performer. Mary named the device after her mother, Sarabet. Her rst attempt failed, because the lights were activated and deactivated instantly. To fade the lights in and out, a new electrical component had to be designed: the rheostat. This component is still used today. Other components were also patented by Hallock-Greenewalt, such as the liquid-mercury switch. The principle of the rheostat was infringed by General Electric some years later. It is unclear what happened when Mary Hallock-Greenewalt tried to sue them. Some sources state that the eventually won the case in 1934, but there is also a story known where the judge had denied the case, because the inventions were too complex to be invented by a woman [17].

Figure 6: Disque Optophonique by Rossin e Several performances were given by Rossin, starting in 1912 e in Paris. He performed until the late 1920s, but his work was displayed in several museums in Europe and the US from 1966 to 1975. Mary Hallock-Greenewalt kept performing on her Sarabet for several years. In 1946 she published her book, entitled Nourathar: The Fine Art of Light-Color Playing [9]. Others have also based their own interpretations of a color organ on a piano, such as Arthur C. Vinageras chromopiano in 1921. Unfortunately very little is known about this device, apart from the fact that it was at the time unique in the feature of showing chords of lights, combining multiple colors in one picture.

4.6

Alexander Laszlo

Alexander Laszlo [20, 17], a Hungarian raised in Germany, was a ne pianist and orchestra conductor, sometimes ranked in the same order as the more famous Liszt. In the rst two decades of the 20th century, he composed and performed music for various lms. Despite the fact that in these days lms were still silent, there should be a clear relation between the lm and the music. This inspired Laszlo to write

5.2

Thomas Wilfred

The rst person to attempt taking color music to the homes of people was Thomas Wilfred. In 1922 he introduced the

When the machine was nally nished in 1950, Dockum gave a demonstration to an audience. Amongst them was Baroness Rebay. When she saw that the machine needed at least one operator to produce the imagery, she was very disappointed. Charles Dockum gave several performances on the MobilColor. One of them was caught on lm. After this, the MobilColor was put into storage instead of displaying it in the Guggenheim Museum. Some years later, the machine was dismantled. Some parts were given away, the rest was thrown away. Dockum kept working on a MobilColor machine for the rest of his life until 1977. At this time, his machine was already quite old-fashioned because of the introduction of the computer.

5.4

Strand Electric

Figure 7: Thomas Wilfred in front of his Clavilux Junior

In 1932 Fred Bentham joined Strand Electric, a company working in the area of light technology. Their goal was to create a device that would be able to control stage lighting in a more direct manner, from a place where the stage can be directly observed. Many fundamental principles in the design of this control device were based on the ideas of Rimington, many years earlier. The result was the Light Console and Compton Organ for Colour Music [2, 20] (see Figure 8). The control device looked very much like a conventional church organ, even the traditional keys where used, although not in the traditional layout. However, this device was used to control stage lights instead of producing music.

Clavilux [20, 31, 17]. Similar to Visual Music, this device did not make any actual music, but it produced imagery solely based on light and color. The home version of the Clavilux (Home Clavilux or Clavilux Junior) looked like an old-fashioned TV set. Some versions even had a TV-like remote control (although not wireless). It was based on a moving 100 watt bulb projecting light on an opaque screen using colored lters. These lters were painted glass discs which could be interchanged by the user. The Clavilux Junior along with its creator is shown in gure 7. Wilfred claimed that his invention could play for days, or even months without showing the same imagery twice. Although the inventor claimed the device to be a great success, being accepted by the public very well, only 14 Home Clavilux were ever made and sold. It is remarkable that since the death of Thomas Wilfred in 1968 not one Clavilux has ever been put up for sale or auction.

5.3

Charles Dockum

Charles Dockum [17] was an electrical engineer from Texas. He was forced to move to Arizona because of health issues. He started working on a machine here which produced moving abstract images and color in harmony, comparable to music. His rst attempts on this MobilColor machine, as he called this art form, were quite successful, allowing him to move to California. In California Dockum continued working on the MobilColor. He also met Oskar Fischinger here, which inspired him even more. When Baroness Rebay from the Guggenheim Museum saw his work in 1942, she granted him with a Guggenheim funding to create a MobilColor machine which could be installed and play in the Guggenheim Museum.

Figure 8: Light Console and Compton Organ for Colour Music Various versions of this device where installed all over the world, mostly in Great Britain, but also in Turkey, Portugal and Venezuela. The number of controlled lights varied from 60 to 216. The introduction of the device at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia in 1939 was quite impressive. A light show, accompanied by music, was given on a transparent perspex tower, covering multiple storeys. The tower was

standing in the middle of an articial lake and was lit from the inside. Although the Light Console was quite a success, it was later replaced by a normal set of faders. However, the principle of one man being able to control all the stage lighting by himself from a position where the stage could be directly observed remained from this point on.

5.5

Oskar Fischinger

Oskar Fischinger [17] was involved in the creation of animated lm before World War II. After the war Disney released the Fantasia movie [5], using similar techniques as Fischinger and others, such as Blanc-Gatti (who actually talked with Disney about the concept of visual music). Sueing Disney had failed, but Fischinger had a new project to set his mind to. Figure 9: Jean-Michel Jarre playing the Laser Harp His goal was to create a color organ for commercial use, the Lumigraph. Unfortunately, he never found a manufacturer to support him. It did not produce any music. In fact, this was one of the rst devices ever to use a touch screen. The touched place by the operator was the only place to show light. This allowed the user to create his own imagery. Disappointingly a second operator was needed to control the color of the light on cue. The intention was to accompany the performance of the Lumigraph by music. The biggest success the Lumigraph ever had was the appearance in the movie The Time Travelers in 1964, three years before the death of Oskar Fischinger. In this movie, the device was introduced as a love machine, capable of producing love for anyone near it, instead of a machine for visual music. After his death, his son built two more machines in dierent sizes. His wife and daughter did some performances accross Europe and the United States. Today we can still enjoy the work of Fischinger, for one of his devices is still accidentally played in the Deutsches Filmmuseum [1] in Frankfurt. Also, a DVD with some of his original animated lms has been released in 2006 [6]. One important distinction has to be made when looking at virtual color organs. Color organs are devices that create colors based on music, not sound. When colors are created based on sound, it is called a (music) visualization. Visualizations distinguish the sound levels in various frequency ranges. The input for color organs are higher-level musical features, such as notes, chords or instrument types. Wellknown visualizations are found in popular music players such as Windows Media Player of Nullsoft Winamp. An example of a virtual color organ is The 21th Century Virtual Reality Color Organ by Jack Ox and David Britton [19]. It uses multiple features extracted from the music, such as patterns of rising and falling melody lines, changes in dynamics and rhythmic aspects. The result is a 3D virtual landscape, created on basis of pencil drawn textures, placed in space based on musical features. For example: The saturation of the colors reects the dynamics (loud versus soft) of the music. Some examples of the resulting landscapes created by this organ can be found in [18]. Another interpretation on the virtual color organ is done by Taylor et al [28]. Three kinds of mappings from dierent features of music to dierent visualizations were implemented to experiment with in real-time. Visual imagery was created from vocal features. A virtual character reacted to the emotional content of a sung melody. Finally, a 3D environment was created based on several musical features. This project shows that these types of visualization are no longer strictly bounded to organ-like devices. Other musical sources like vocals can also be used. Thomas Ciufo [4] has also investigated the possibilities to generate visual stimuli based on musical features in realtime. His main concern is the apparent arbitrariness between the musical features and the visual stimuli which is connected to it. However, quite many examples of feasible mappings have been proposed in the past.

6. MODERN INTERPRETATIONS 6.1 Bernard Szajner

Where most artists tried to convert music to the visual area, Bernard Szajner [26] did the opposite in 1981. His laser harp (see Figure 9) consists of several vertical parallel laser beams. When a beam is interrupted by for example a hand, or a mirror, the corresponding note on a synthesizer plays. The result is a spectacle where the performer is much more active and thus entertaining to the public than when he would have stand behind a synthesizer. The laser harp has become famous by Jean-Michel Jarre, a musician specialized in electronic music.

6.2

Virtual color organ

As already stated earlier, when attempts to create color organs are taken in these days, it is not necessary to create complex mechanical devices anymore. The introduction of the computer enables the option to create virtual color organs. The possibilities implied by the usage of virtual organs are ways beyond those of mechanical solutions.

7.

A PERSONAL EXERCISE

This section describes my attempt to create a virtual color organ based on a painting by Picabia [8], who mocks the idea of color-music correspondence.

7.1

Picabia

In 1915, a painter from France named Francis Picabia drew a painting titled Music is like Painting (see Figure 10). The title is the exact reverse of the more commonly accepted note-color correspondence, stating that colors are like music. The shape in which the colors of the painting are captured, are remarkably similar to the scientic model of the behavior of alpha, beta and gamma particles in a magnetic eld as shown in Figure 11. Given these two observations, Picabia seems to mock the idea of color-music correspondence, doubting the credibility of those who work on it, or believe in such a direct correspondence.

Given this information, we may assume that Picabia did not believe in the relevance of such color-music models. In my opinion, it would be nice to show that the painting produced by Picabia can actually be used to create some sort of a digital version of a color organ. This is also a nice exercise in the implementation of such a system.

7.2

Design and Implementation

A real-time working system is created, which directly responds to the strokes of keys on a keyboard. The combination of Java with a MIDI [16] keyboard is very suitable for this. Using a MIDI cable between a keyboard and the sound card in a PC, Java is able to capture the strokes of the keys in real-time, providing information about the tonal height, velocity and duration of each stroke. Note that Francis Picabia used three types of lines in his painting, straight vertical lines, half circles to the right and curves to the left. Using only intuition as a background, I applied the following mapping: Tonal height: straight vertical lines Duration: half circles to the right Loudness: curves to the left In the painting, we see that each of the line types has multiple instances. I propose to use this to create a dierence between low and high tones, short and long notes, and soft and hard strokes. To prevent a chaos of numerous lines in the painting, only the last 20 notes are drawn on the canvas. Low tones will be the left straight lines, where high tones will be the straight lines on the right. The mapping applies to the notes from A to G. There is no dierence in regard to the octave in which a certain note is played. If all octaves where squeezed in next to eachother, this would generate many lines close to each other, which is not the style op Picabias painting. The biggest half circle, which reaches all the way to the side of the painting represents the longest duration which has occurred so far in the music. Shorter notes will have proportional smaller half circles. The curves to the left can be seen as parts of a circle, cut o on a specic line. The velocity of each stroke is mapped so that the size of the radius of the circle gets bigger when a key is hit harder. Just like many implementations of color organs in history, I chose to create a direct note-color correspondance. It is however not based on the tonal height only. The three characteristics of the notes are mapped to the hue, saturation and value components of a HSV color model. Tonal height: hue Duration: saturation

Figure 10: Music is like painting by Francis Picabia

Figure 11: Behavior of particles in a magnetic eld

Loudness: value

It is also possible to use random colors by starting the program in random mode.

as implementations of color organs, the used techniques became outdated by the introduction of the computer. Color organs can be divided into several classes. Some color organs have a direct color-note correspondence (such as the clavicin pour les yeux). Others let the combination of colors and music to the performer (such as the color organ by Rimington). The purposes of the various instruments are also very dierent. Where some devices are intended to be used at home (such as the Clavilux Junior), as a source of entertainment, other are meant to light stage performances based on the simultaneously played music (such as the Light Console by Strand Electric). A third type was only intended for research on the relationship between color and music, without the desire to perform to an audience on it (such as the device by Arcimboldo). Another varying factor is the ability to actually produce music. Some devices are only based on the similarity between sound and colors. They produce colors in a way which resembles music. Most devices simultaneously produce music and sound, trying to achieve synaesthetic eects. An exercise in the form of the design and implementation of a virtual color organ has shown that the techniques of these days make this fairly easy. Using basic techniques such as Java and MIDI, one can develop a program which produces colors based on music in real-time quite fast. Although the created virtual color organ is able to produce nice pictures, it his highly doubtable whether it will inict synaesthetic eects. In order to investigate how these eects can be optimized, advanced psychological research would be needed.

7.3

Results

The result of striking some notes or chords on the keyboard is a canvas which resembles the Picabia painting very much, as shown in Figure 12. There are however some dierences.

Figure 12: Screen shot of the Interactive Picabia Painting In Picabias painting, lines do not cross. Because this implementation is actually based on notes played on a keyboard, it may occur for example that a short high note crosses with a long low note. This does not necessarily mean that the painting failed, but it is dierent from Picabia. The system should not be used for live performances because it lacks nice eects such as fading in of the lines or drawing eects. (It does however use live feed, so the process of creation can be followed). It is hard to distinguish various types of music in the visualization. Fast, dynamic music will result in a painting which changes more often. Not every result is great, one should play with the system for a while and store the nicer results.

9.

REFERENCES

8.

CONCLUSIONS

The development of the color organ has been slowed down engineering issues in multiple occasions. When the rst ideas on color instruments by Arcimboldo arrived, the current knowledge about mechanics was often not sucient enough to actually build the intended devices eciently. On the other hand, during the late days of mechanical devices

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