Project Scriabin
Exploring Sound and Color Through Culture
The next phase of Project Scriabin is to expand upon the association of sound and color by viewing the coupling through the lens of cultural differences between Western and Eastern music. The bulk of the project will remain as a TouchDesigner application and the interfacing mechanism will still be a second screen painting application (Adobe Photoshop) but with a second mode to differentiate between the east/west sound-color pairings.
The thought process behind the color spectrum pairings of eastern/western music will be framed by the debate between the adopted standardized tuning of A=440 hz (or concert pitch) and A=432 hz which is thought to be more harmonic and intune with the resonant natural frequencies of the universe.
I have decided on this differentiation based on my many years of experiencing western music through music education. Western music is derived from European standards of music that have evolved from secular music that tends to be far more structured. Though much of eastern music evolved from similar secular roots, the inclusion of more notes has equated to a sound that is much more open and fluid in nature.
The color association will no longer be based on Alexander Scriabin's own personal experiences with synesthesia since I wanted to have a more uniformed approach. The note-color pairings will now be based on a theoretical conversion equation that compresses the frequency of visual light to the audible frequency range.
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The structural differences between eastern and western music that will be explored are much more apparent and easier concepts to grasp. Simply put, the tonal structure of western music is based on a 12-tone chromatic scale, every key is derived from a scale based on one of these 12 tones. In eastern music, there are more tones, half and quarter tones that can be found between the 12 chromatic tones of traditional western music. In the case of this project, I will be using the Arab System which has 24 notes, a halftone between each of the 12 chromatic notes. The differences this has on the spectrum can be seen in the following images.
To explore what differences the two musical spectrums could possibly have on the structure and aesthetics of an expressive object I have constructed a three-dimensional visualization of the tonal outputs from the painting application.
The audio visualization is designed to change its form based on various structural elements of both the aural and visual inputs. The governing principles for the audio visualization are as follows.
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The RGB color values of any given note-color pairing control the external forces of the audiovisual wave, like wind speed and turbulence.
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The frequency and wavelength control the number of particles generated in the rows and columns of the audiovisual waveform respectively.
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The rotation speed and the rate at which the waves oscillate is controlled by the value/velocity of the midi note that is sent to Ableton Live.
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The color of the particle field will directly correlate to the color present in the sound-color pairings.
