A Little Bit of Color-Music

            For our final blog-of-choice, I will be discussing a technology that has been centuries in development, and which is still undergoing massive changes. As most physicists would tell you, light and sound are very similar in the way they are produced for our perception. They are both waves, though light is transverse and sound is longitudinal, and the frequency of their waves determine how our bodies perceive them. It would even be logical, though incorrect, to assume that light and sound are created by the same mechanisms. Because of this, the linkage of light and sound in music is a very interesting field of performance art.

            First of all, I would like to bring up the fact that, though it might not seem like it, lighting does play a role in your experience of a musical composition. Performing a piece in absolute darkness creates a very different experience than playing that same piece in a well-lit room. However, it is even more interesting to examine efforts to parallel lighting and musical performances. This began with the concept of a “color-organ” in the form of a Clavecin Oculaire, invented by Louis-Bertrand Castel around 1725 (Peacock 399). He proposed to use a system of candles and colored paper controlled by the keys of a harpsichord to produce various hues and tints of colored light corresponding to different notes of the scale. In its most recent form, the Clavilux 2000 uses a wall display and an electric keyboard to play colored lights along with the music, creating what amounts to a permanent light record of the music played.

            A related but different innovation in this field, one more akin to laser light shows than anything else, except perhaps an orchestral performance, is the original Clavilux, invented by Thomas Wilfred in 1922. It used a very complex system to create shifting colored lights on a screen, and has “been compared by many to the beautiful display of the Aurora Borealis” (Peacock 405). It is also reminiscent of the way Fantasia used short movies to capture the essence of an orchestral piece. Wilfred composed just over 160 works for the Clavilux, many of the later of which were recorded for exhibition in museums as Lumia. I’ll close here with an excerpt of one of these (along with a video of the Clavilux 2000 in use).

Works Cited

Peacock, Kenneth. "Instruments to Perform Color-Music: Two Centuries of Technological Experimentation." Leonardo 21.4 (1988): 397-406. JSTOR. Web. 17 Apr. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578702>.