Color Intervals

             In my last blog, I mentioned that I have been conducting a bit of research related to my book. Much of this research involves investigating the connections between music and visual art. Some individuals who have made these connections have suggested that colors may be a valuable tool in learning musical intervals. 

            One female educator at the famous Bauhaus school, Gertrud Grunow, correlated pitches with color using a wheel of twelve divisions. She believed that perceiving color would aid music students in  increasing their aural abilities.

            While Grunow approached this concept from a music background, more recently Katherine Lubar made similar correlations through her background as a painter and color theorist. Specifically, Lubar relates the twelve hues of the color wheel to the twelve interval combinations within an octave. Unlike people who associate colors with specific pitches, this approach uses a more flexible format where the distance of two colors on the color wheel correspond to a specific musical interval. For example, colors next to each other on the color wheel such as red and red-orange or blue and blue-violet are identified as a minor second, the interval where two notes are found adjacent to each other on the piano. This color interval system becomes quite extensive as it involves all the color relationships on the color wheel and their musical equivalents.

            So you may be asking, that is all very interesting, but what does all of this information have to do with sight-reading? Well, intervals are the bedrock of sight-reading and those of you who may have difficulty with this aspect in music may find it much easier to see visually on the color wheel. Additionally, for my book, I have decided to adopt the color wheel concept for musical intervals as an organizing principle for the book's structure. Instead of labeling exercises as 1-1 or 1-2, each exercise will be identified as a color relationship such as yellow and yellow-green or red-violet and violet. The purpose here is to stimulate imagination and visualization to make the subject material more vivid and assist students who make visual connections more easily.

        Have you ever linked colors with music? If you have let me know in the comment section below.

Stay tuned,

Robert