This is the second part of my musings on connections between music and color which started here.

I left off with the arithmetic progression. Now for the second of the three: Geometric. Again, this is a three-term proportion where a > b > c. In the language of ratios, a and c are the extremes and b is the mean. As with an arithmetic progression, begin with two of the differences in the numbers: a—b and b—c. In a geometric or harmonic progression, these differences are to each other in the same way as one of these numbers is to one of the other numbers, not as one of the numbers is to itself as in an arithmetic proportion.

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My attempts to determine whether or not a rational basis exists for my intuition of a relationship between color and music led me back to Robert Lawlor’s Sacred Geometry, a book I first read about a decade ago, specifically chapter VIII, “Mediation: Geometry Becomes Music.” (The quotes and examples in this post are from the 1994 Thames and Hudson edition.)¹

As I worked through the color relationships for the new body of work, I felt there might be some such relationship. In a previous post, The closed circle and the infinite loop, my first instinct was that the colors for the series somehow related to thirds and fifths in music. I now amend this to fourths and fifths after reading Lawlor.

This is based on the concept of “mediating proportions” – binding two extremes through a single mean term.

There are three such mediating proportions: arithmetic, geometric and harmonic. It’s the latter I’m trying to puzzle through (which means I’ll need to relearn everything I’ve forgotten about music theory). So between music theory and color theory is there a correspondence we can define and talk about? It’s all vibration, right?

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Working on a new body of work based on the secondary and tertiary colors in color theory (working title Seconds and Thirds), I had a spontaneous thought those colors seemed to correspond to thirds and fifths in music.

I mentioned this to a new Facebook friend who asked about my practice and who, synchronistically, works with color and sound. He recommended a book to me, Interference: A Grand Scientific Musical Theory. I have worked some with interference media and am fascinated by interference in waveforms and cymatics, so I was intrigued. Also synchronistically another friend is working with fluid dynamics which as far as I know, and I don’t know much, is related to chaos theory. Everything came together in my mind in an ‘ah-ha’ moment where I saw the connections in all these, and then, of course, immediately lost it. Color harmony, musical harmony, symmetry in chaos…

I began reading Interference this morning. Besides rekindling memories of studying piano and the point at which the patterns my hands made on the keyboard were beginning to make sense, this is what struck me:

The Pythagoreans were searching for a unified theory of everything, just like some physicists today. What is the underlying harmony behind the veil of our senses which unites all phenomena? So they, the Pythagoreans that is, came up with the idea of stacking musical fifths, believing that “a stack of five perfects 5ths’ should close to form a pentagram at the third octave.” This is based on their association of the geometry of sound with certain regular shapes, in this case the pentagram, an important form in sacred geometry. Well, it didn’t work. Turns out there’s a gap. The circle is not closed, but is an infinite spiral, like the famous Nautilus. And so it’s my guess, at this point in my reading, that the gap is equal to the phi ratio.

Somehow in my mind this is all related to mixing colors. Stay tuned.