LISTENING TO COLOUR
Published in ‘Do Re Mi Fa So La Te’ An Exhibition Catalogue, Perimeter Space, Griffin Gallery London
An Essay by Isha Bøhling
In the scene where Julie Andrews runs into the hills in the Rodgers and Hammerstein film The Sound of Music (1965) 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 and 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 her seven pupils. 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. 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 (1977), this process is reversed. Here sound and colour are transformed into 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 – having 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 Erratum Musical. It was a musical composition for three voices created by random notes drawn out of a hat. The Composition was created through chance, rather than an organised system or any single language. This would later be appropriated by John Cage[1] 4′33″ (1952) in which Cage would eradicate colour and sound and language altogether in his silent white rooms. 4’33’’ was written in three movements for any combination of instruments whereby the musicians never play.
As a young art student in the early ‘90s, 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 photocopies of Kandinsky’s Composition VIII (1923). I was trying in this very 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 sync to the 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 a reaction to the post minimalist monochrome tendency in the art of the 90s.
All these ideas of colour’s association to music seem perhaps quaint now in visual art as the two coexist much more clearly with our ever-evolving technology. We are more accustomed to seeing colour in relation to digital media, where audio and visual are seamlessly integrated. Colour is just there, to be used and that’s it.
For Neil Harbisson, however, colour is simply not ‘just there’. He has a rare condition called achromatopsia; he is colour blind and sees only in shades of grey. In 2003, he created his first 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, he was able to experience colour, and perceive the idea of colour for the first time in his life.
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’ – the Cyborg Antenna [2] - 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 implanting 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 colour 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 these systems and patterns are all a form of 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 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 and the faintest whispers in the colours of the canyons.
Isha Bøhling 2018
Footnotes:
[1] Interestingly, the American minimalist musician was taught and influenced by Schoenberg. Cage would later befriend Duchamp and even collaborate in 1968.
[2] Harbisson was the first British citizen to be officially recognised as a Cyborg in his passport