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 nonsense by thinking of notes 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

UPDATE: Here are a few more items to consider regarding the relationship of color and sound, specifically the visible spectrum of light and the audio spectrum.

Art history portrays two different art movements in the early 20th century that embrace the relationship of sound and color: Orphism and Synchromism.

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/orphism/

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/synchromism/

In addition to this here is a contemporary composer that recently presented musical works at the FermiLab that interpret data collected from the behavior of subatomic particles into musical form. The composer, Dr. David Ibbett, uses the process of sonification to transpose the spectrum of visible light into a musical scale.

This is achieved by doubling the tone as in raise an octave but do this 40 times to reach visible light frequencies. Or go from a color's frequency and divide by the same constant and derive a tone. For example, if you raise "the note A 440 Hertz" forty octaves it's frequency is close to 483.79 THz which is in the range of the color orange.

Here is a graphic that demonstrates the conversion of light to sound. (source: https://www.flutopedia.com/sound_color.htm)

This update suggests a standard way to convert notes into colors, but still there is some room for interpretation. For one thing the visible spectrum is just shy of an octave, 400–790 THz so trying to make a full octave means that if you start with Red, the top note won't be visible or if you start with infrared to see the highest note then the lowest note might not be visible. Additionally, the audio spectrum we can hear is about 10 octaves, so it is arbitrary which of the 10 audio octaves to convert the color. Also, visible light is both made of particles and waves, where audio is simply waves.

This update (2-28-2021) shows a more scientific way to convert music to color but still has a lot of room for arbitration. My answer below from 7 years ago should now read that there is a way to covert A 440 Hz to a color, but not necessarily every note is so secure to have a color such as E through F# appear to be on the borders.

================== Original Answer ============================================ 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

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

A lot of music in the schools has the color coding for Boomwackers and bells. I have used these colors for keyboards as well. Red=C Orange=D Yellow=E Green=F Blue=G Purple=A Pink=B. This has worked well for my very young students 3 to 5 year olds. It also helps to identify C for all students when beginning my large group classes.

Answer 4

The composer Scriabin designed a colour note organ. I think the pitch values of notes are arbitrary but timbre/texture/shape can have ascribed hues and intensities. eg.. A high flute tone can be silver, a deep piano note black etc. . It's a bit of a blind alley though as surely most music ends up muddy brown!

Answer 5

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 6

To convert notes into colors in the most physics-inspired way, multiply the audio frequencies by 2^40 (40 octaves) to obtain terahertz frequencies in the visible range.

Starting from A=440Hz, this yields:

• F#: 737nm (dark red)
• G: 696nm (red)
• G#: 657nm (unfortunately also red in RGB colorspace)
• A: 620nm (orange-red)
• A#: 585nm (yellow)
• B: 552nm (green-yellow / chartreuse)
• C: 521nm (green)
• C#: 492nm (cyan)
• D: 464nm (sky blue)
• D#: 438nm (blue)
• E: 414nm (blue-indigo)
• F: 390nm (indigo)
• F#: 369nm (deep violet)

To get around G (696nm) and G# (657nm) both translating red in RGB color space, and the deepness of F# violet: I would suggest using violet for F#, dark red for G, red for G#, and orange for A.

See:

• http://www.endolith.com/wordpress/2010/09/15/a-mapping-between-musical-notes-and-colors/
• http://rohanhill.com/tools/WaveToRGB/ to do the conversion from wavelength to RGB color
• If you can excuse the sound-healing pseudoscience, this page contains a nice conversion that uses an orange-red for G# as an approximation: http://www.lunarplanner.com/Harmonics/planetary-harmonics.html

Answer 7

I had one of these as a child. There was an accompanying booklet which had music notation with coloured noteheads. This instrument is rather non standard - the black notes sound G, and it plays a major scale. So that green notebar actually sounds F#

Colours can be helpful to provide a steer for self-teaching beginners. But once you've passed the beginner stage you don't need colours. Black and white printing (and plain silver notebars!) are sufficient.

Answer 8

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 9

The constructed language Solresol, which was created in the 1800s intended as an international auxiliary language, uses solfege syllables as the available sounds. It also features several different available writing/communication methods, including color and actual pitches.