Marilyn's Photos - Jan 18 2026 - What Colour is that Note?
When did colour get associated with music? We think of colour as relating to eye sight. The origins say it started out meaning skin colour, hue or appearance. It has a few meanings that developed from Middle English on. There’s the heraldry meaning, a figurative meaning - “to use words to a certain effect; to make something appear different from reality or better than it is.” And there’s that influence or affect meaning,as in - coloured her whole experience.
The Greeks had a chromatic scale - chroma, meaning colour. Our modern usage came into common use in the late 1800s. It is used to describe timbre with adjectives like bright, dark, warm, reedy, brassy, nasal, mellow, airy, or piercing. This comes from the arabesqueconservatory.com website. The website is full of information on this subject HERE.
What about the condition of synesthesia - where the brain experiences colours in response to visual cues like letters or auditory cues like sounds? This occurs for a small percentage of the population. The sound to colour version is chromesthesia - where a sound involuntarily evokes an experience of colour, shape and movement.
Franz Liszt spoke in colour terms to his orchestra: “O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!” I wonder what they did to satisfy that request! Or what about: “That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!” You can imagine how they at first responded to such commands - I’d be shaking my head.
Duke Ellington’s chromesthesia was documented in his 1981 biography. “I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it’s one colour. I hear the same note played by someone else and it’s a different colour.”
Billy Joel has spoken of his chromesthesia. Quite a few musician and composers have this condition.
I wonder if today’s topic can fulfill a challenge to have a joke every day. What Chromesthesia jokes might there be? Here they are:
Why was the note C so angry? It was seeing red.
Why do bass players prefer the colour blue? Because they are always feeling a little flat.
And what about this non-Chromesthesia joke:
A drummer walks into a music store and says, "I'd like the red trumpet and the white accordion." The owner answers: "You can have the fire extinguisher, but the radiator stays where it is!"
This picture is the result of a watercolour technique of putting salt - table salt, sea salt, etc on the wet paint and textures will result. Sometimes they look like flowers and other times like frost.
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