COLOR-MUSIC

by Theodore F. Kar-woski and Henry S. Odbert, Psychologi-cal Monographs, Volume 50, No. 2,1938.

The contributions which receive the greatest recognition in these years of Our Lord are those that promise to improve our material well-being. Most efforts having to do with our spiritual well-being are relatively unheeded. Because of the paucity of our spiritual understanding, we may lack a basis for evaluating most of the contributions in this field. There is one line of development, however, concerning the value of which we can have no doubt. That is the development of art forms through which values can be expressed and communicated. For this reason, the contribution of Dr. Karwoski and Dr. Odbert toward the development of the new art form of color-music should receive broad recognition.

This study has taken a definite step forward by discarding the traditionally atomistic scientific investigation which offered so little hope for a systematic development of color-music. This step is accomplished by a change in methodology from the usual attempts to relate colors to single notes, to the investigation of relationships between colors and complete musical phrases.

They find three general types of individuals who experience colored visual sensations when stimulated by musical configurations; those having a rudimentary color response, those in which images from personal experience dominate the color response and those in which the elements of the musical composition are represented in the chromatic patterns.

They also discover considerable uniformity in the different patterns of response. These patterns can be grouped into four classes and are described as representing the "simple band," the "multiple band," the "sound track" and the "full design form." The descriptive terms used suggest pictures of the forms of the color patterns experienced by the observers.

Implications for Gestalt Psychology are found in the fact that the figure and ground relationships of the chromatic experience correspond to the figure and ground aspects of the music.

The most important contribution to the experimental development of color-music as an art form lies in the discovery of the relative frequency of chromesthesia together with the fluidity of the phenomena. These two facts combine to indicate that color-music can be more widely appreciated than was previously thought.