Is there a color code for notes?

Question

A few days ago, to learn to play music, I bought a keyboard (Yamaha, EZ-30). It has lighted keys and all light red. It somehow felt wrong that all keys light up red.

If A lights up red, then C should light up yellow - that's how I would think (may be I am biased because of my inclination toward physics - red is low frequency, yellow is higher frequency).

My question: is there a standard coding of colors for the musical notes (like that of a resistor) or am I just thinking non-sense by thinking it in terms of colors?

I also think that since my keyboard is touch sensitive, a hard A should light up brighter than a soft A.

Answer 1

There is no standard for converting musical notes into colors. This would be an arbitrary process as there is no way to convert say "A" 440 Hz into a specific wave length of light. It might be interesting to perhaps make up your own. Many artists have tried to correlate color with sound so it is definitely a notion that has been around for a long time.

http://www.oskarfischinger.org/OF_Filmo.htm

http://www.insea.org/publications/music-art-project

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/1577978

You might want to see how scientists use pseudo-color to assist in illustrating a condition or concept. Here is a wiki on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-color

NASA, NOAA, and many astronomy images use pseudo-color:

http://www.spaceweather.com/images2012/21may12/coronalhole_sdo_blank.jpg

Here's some off the wall thing I found about music, this might be the sort of tool you are looking to use:

http://www.gootar.com/theory.htm

Answer 2

There's no standard. So I've come up with my own standard :) There are 12 tertiary colors and there are 12 tones in an octave. So that should be an obvious thing to map.

Here's an example of my little program: http://pianocheetah.com/tutorial/practice.html

I map red to the keysignature's tone. Then the 12 tertiary colors take us up to the leading tone of the scale (12th in the octave, 7th in the major scale).

So the colors go:

• 0 red
• 1 orange
• 2 yellow
• 3 yellow-green
• 4 green
• 5 cyan
• 6 lt blue
• 7 blue
• 8 dk purple
• 9 purple
• 10 pink
• 11 magenta-pink-whatever

Stepping the "hue" of a color in 12 steps gets you those.

So a major scale would be: red,yellow,green,cyan,blue,purple,magenta minor scale would have yellowgreen instead of green, etc. (modified 6th and 7th color too) It works out pretty good.

The reason you don't want A as your base color is that C is usually your keysignature note and is the base of the scale.

So if there WAS to be a standard, it'd probably be this :) But if you go to pianoworld.com and ask THAT forum what color notes should be, you'll get back a BIG LOUD yell of =just black=.

Use whatever colors you want.

Answer 3

As a kid in the late 60's and 70's I remember there was a standard color scheme that was widely used in organ beginner books. The color scheme was used at first by manufacturers in an attempt to make the music learning process seem simple and easy to assimilate. The colors were mostly used to help identify the notes in the lower keyboard which was electronically designed with the auto chord and auto rhythm functions. I'm not sure I remember correctly, but I think C=blue, F=green, G=red... If you look in "old" used book stores you may find some of these beginner books that came with WURLITZER and LOWREY organs.

Answer 4

There is a piano pedagogy method known as the "Rainbow Piano Technique" that assigns colors to different notes on the keyboard.

This color code includes a large number of distinct colors which are assigned to notes spanning a little more than 3 octave, including selected accidentals. Colors are not repeated at the octave. Color tags are meant to be taped to your keyboard.

The method then uses special scores with noteheads that are colored to correspond to the colored tags on the keyboard.

Answer 5

Fantastic! I have found the music stack exchange!

I have been researching alternative musical representations for a while: looks like the colours I came up with a pretty similar to what Stephen outlayed.

You can see on my site: http://toneme.org/

In fact I have released a free iPhone app which puts the 12 pitch classes around in a circle: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chromatone/id466239553?mt=8

( There is actually a more advanced version of this instrument on the aforementioned site if you can be bothered to download the Unity plug-in. )