Color music
Combination of music with color and light, for instance through color organs or synaesthetic concepts.
What it means
Color music refers to attempts to combine music with color and light. Behind it stands the idea that tones and colors can correspond to each other, whether by a fixed assignment or through a personal, synaesthetic experience in which one sensory stimulus triggers a second.
Musical use
Considerations of tone-color analogies were known already in the Baroque, and in the 18th century color harpsichords were devised. Around 1900 the subject gathered pace: Alexander Scriabin provided for his orchestral work Prometheus (1910) a “light keyboard” intended to project colored light to the music. In the 20th century followed color-light plays, abstract film, and today's light art and visualisations to music.
Color music should be distinguished from timbre, which denotes the character of a sound and needs no real colors, and from program music, which tells pictures or stories. Color music, by contrast, really joins the two sensory realms, hearing and seeing.
Performance practice
When experiencing color music, note whether light and sound are linked by a recognisable rule or freely shaped. If you work with light to music yourself, keep color changes and music closely in time so the two levels reinforce each other.