Listening to Colour

By Isha Bøhling

In the scene where Julie Andrews runs into the hills in the Rodgers and Hammerstein movie, “The Sound of Music,” we sense the bright open expanse of the mountains, the bright sky, inhaling the alpine air, the soft vegetation beneath our feet, the smell of fresh grass, the scent of new bloom, and the joy and exaltation of spring as if seeing and experiencing the world for the first time. The landscape is singing in full bloom in all its glorious technicolour. At the heart of this musical is the seamless connection between language, colour, and sound.

The main character Maria uses the seven syllable song ‘Do re mi’ to teach notes in the major scale, to the seven Von Trapp children. This teaching device is called a solflége, a method for learning how to sing through visual and audible musical notation. This system relies on the inherent note produced when you sing the words and thus gives you a sense of any pitch at any given time in a piece of music. Its a system that has been applied to many other areas, from science to philosophy and is typically accompanied by colour, in particular music. In a very real way, the use of language here becomes sound; any meaning of the words is subverted to allow their audio effect to dominate. Language simply becomes music.

In Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this process is reversed. In the film sound and colour are transformed into a language. Based on a vision of the main character, a group of scientists build a machine that uses coloured lights and a synchronised audio system. The inspiration for the machine comes from the same soflége language where ‘colour organs’ were used to experience music through colour in accompaniment of sound. In the film, this instrument directly references the recurring desire for a universal language that can communicate with any form of intelligence. It also bears witness to the hope that a more intuitive intelligence is possible within the patterns of sound and colour rather than the precision and limitations of language.

This desire for a universal language of sound and colour was explored by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky. Believing himself to be a synesthete, the sensation of visibly seeing colour when hearing sounds. He suggested that colour and sound were directly linked, and had a spiritual meaning that surpassed the ability of language to describe. In 1903, he made a series of wood cuts called ‘Poems without words’. These were a response to short lyrical piano pieces made popular by Mendelssohn at the time called ‘Songs without words’. Kandinsky’s friend the composer, painter and music theorist Schoenberg, was also trying to develop the relationship between colour and music. In 1913, they collaborated on experimental plays which behaved more like experimental performance. They were titled ‘Yellow Sound’, ‘Green Sound ‘or ‘Black and White’ in an attempt to break down the barriers between the audio and visual. These experiments broke down traditions in the synthesis of drama, words, colour and music in order to merge everything into one language.

In that same year Marcel Duchamp created ‘Musical Erratum’. It was a musical composition created by random notes drawn out of a hat. The composition was created by chance not an organised system or any single language. This would later be appropriated by John Cage in the 1950’s, ‘with 4”33’ Cage would eradicate colour and sound and language altogether in his silent white rooms. Interestingly, the American minimalist musician was taught and influenced by Schoenberg.

As a young art student in the early 90’s, using a 1983 Supernova computer I created an animation for Jazz FM. The machine applied moving loops of colour in a pre-determined pattern to my collaged photo copies of Kandinsky’s Composition VIII (1923) I was trying in this very blunt and low-fi way to bring life to the painting, and with MTV also lingering in my mind, I added a somewhat incongruous pair of legs dancing across the screen in synch to music. In retrospect, it was naively more hilarious than insightful, but it was the beginning of my interest in the relationship between sound and colour. It was also in reaction to the post-minimalist monochrome tendency in the art of the 90’s and the negative discourse around colour.

All these ideas of colour’s association to music seems perhaps quaint now in painting and art as the two coexist much more clearly with new technology. We are much more accustomed to seeing colour in relation to digital media, where the audio and the visual are seamlessly integrated. It is also the platform on to which we see most art nowadays. In film we expect to see colour. In the 2016 Damien Chapelle musical, ‘La La Land’, colour is used in a playful and nonchalant way through the bright coloured outfits of its characters and scenes as if it was never an issue. Colour is just there, to be used and that’s it.

For Neil Harbisson, colour is simply not ‘just there’. He has a rare condition; he is colour blind yet can only see shades of grey. In 2003, he created a device with the help of a cybernetics expert, Adam Montandon to enable him to see colour via his sense of hearing. As Montandon says, “light is a wavelength that travels very fast. If you slow it down enough it stops becoming visible. It becomes audible.” In other words, both light and sound are waves, and as such they have a common property. Their idea was to translate one into the other. Using this wave function, they created a device that transposed the light waves into sounds with different pitches. As Harbisson tested the device for the first time, he was able to experience colour, and perceive the idea of colour for the first time.

He is effectively listening to colour. At first he listened to everything without taking off the device for two weeks; he listened to the colours of houses, local shops, and to the sounds of fruits and vegetables. This sounds both superhuman and mundane in equal measure, but those of us with full colour vision forget the immense amount of ‘looking’ we do all the time, consciously and unconsciously. Harbisson says, “it’s like listening to electronic music.” He now wears a refined version of the ‘eyeborg’ comprising a camera above his head like an antenna, and a small computer chip that converts light to sound. He no longer uses headphones, instead mounting the chip to the back of his skull where it transmits the sound vibrations directly into his skull. Harbisson says, “I receive colour through the bone, and I’m listening to you through the ears.’ This helps him differentiate what is visual sound and what is audio. With his current device he can hear many more colours. He can also hear colours of wavelengths not visible to the human eye, such as infrared and ultraviolet.

While we can’t be certain that what Harbisson ‘hears’ as colour is similar to a fully functioning eye, he is able to tune into frequencies giving him a greater depth of perception. Just like rhythmical patterns give the optical illusion of movement even if we are looking at something static. However it is clear his device uses a type of language, and this language is created and understood by the logic of pattern recognition. Importantly what the device highlights is that we are surrounded by forms we cannot see, and sounds we cannot hear, and that they are systems and patterns, all language.

The audio and the visual are all patterns of information that we perceive, and as such, we can use them to communicate. Each one of course has its advantages and specific limitations, but there remains a persistent desire to find a connection, a way of joining these different media. In theory, the artist has the freedom to work across language and media without limitations. The intention of the artist is seeing and experiencing something for the first time. Creating new forms where there is no structure. Creating colour where there is none, hearing sound where there is silence. Investigating meaning beyond the visible surface and the audible space.

Listening beyond sound to hear the resonance of objects—the faintest whispers in the colours of the canyons.

Isha Bøhling, 2018. Published in ‘Do Re Mi Fa So La Te’ An exhibition Catalogue at Perimeter Space, Griffin Gallery. London