Blog | frasergo.orghttps://www.frasergo.org/blog/2013-11-06T09:45:59+00:00BlogHarmoniHue - coloring musical notes2013-11-06T09:45:59+00:00david/blog/author/david/https://www.frasergo.org/blog/2013/11/harmonihue-coloring-musical-notes/<p>At <a href="http://za.pycon.org/" title="a conference for the Python programming language in South Africa">PyConZA 2013</a>, one of the speakers couldn't come due to a visa issue, so I volunteered to do <a href="http://za.pycon.org/talks/31/" title="my talk on harmonies and hues">a talk</a> at the last minute. I was already on <a href="http://za.pycon.org/talks/27/" title="panel discussion on effective software team practices">a panel discussion</a> earlier, and wanted to listen to <a href="http://za.pycon.org/talks/13/" title="including interesting lessons we've learnt at St James Software">Matt's talk on caching</a>, so I ended with only three-quarters of an hour preparing the talk! But it ended up being a great opportunity as I decided to talk on a fun project I've been pottering away at in my spare time over the last few years: an experiment in music maths and colours that I've called <a href="http://frasergo.org/projects/harmonihue/" title="HarmoniHue project homepage">HarmoniHue</a>.</p>
<p>The basic idea is to try and associate colours with musical notes in such a way that there's a correspondence between which notes sound similar to / harmonious with each other, and how similar the colours look to each other.</p>
<p>Having a mathematical bent, I've ended up investigating things about colour perception theory along the way and coming up with a simple model of harmonic relations - the project will have some updates to the colour model before I'm happy that it's finished, but since I gave the talk on it I thought I would post my musings on the subject on the web for other people to peruse. Here's a few images from the project:</p>
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<p><img alt="Hues and Rotations on Circle of Fifths" height="400" src="/static/media/uploads/galleries/harmonihue/hue-rotation-circle.png" width="400"><br><i>Hues and Rotations on Circle of Fifths</i></p>
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<p><img alt="Musical Tones mapped onto a Torus" height="400" src="/static/media/uploads/galleries/harmonihue/torus-tones.png" width="400"><br><i>Musical Tones mapped onto a Torus</i></p>
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<p>This is then applied to musical scores as follows (excuse the misplacement of accidentals):</p>
<p><img height="60" src="/static/media/uploads/galleries/harmonihue/chromatic-score.png" width="731"></p>
<p><a href="http://frasergo.org/projects/harmonihue/" title="HarmoniHue project homepage">More information on HarmoniHue</a> including my musings and some sample scores etc...</p>