MUSICOLOR
MUSICOLOR has been invented to portray to the eye the workings of musical operations by which all music is formed; and in a way simple and direct enough for a child to grasp, without the need for complex language...The images resulting from Musicolor are often visually beautiful; but their purpose is to represent music. Over the ages, several ways to do this have been developed. One most direct way is to try to translate musical shape into visual, what is called graphic notation. Such were the signs for Gregorian Chant, or for the ornaments in baroque music; and many styles of graphic flowered in the 20th century. Another way was to provide pictures of finger positions on instruments - tablatures, like that for lute or guitar. The common notation developed in the West was rather like an architect's blueprint for erecting a building; it is a measured blueprint for an exact performance. Again, the tonic sol-fa system was another way of representing music. It described certain melodic relationships which were constant, whatever the actual pitches or the instruments which realized them. We could call this a representation of structural relationships.
The images of Musicolor are of this last kind. [A set of coloured pieces once put together by hand, but nowadays on the computer, can form an infinite variety of patterns, which represent musical forms of every kind, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic.]This is not just some kind of visual gimmick, but the result of a wide-reaching analysis of the processes by which all music grows...[see The Gaia of Music] [from the book Musicolour, London 1977, Institute of Contemporary Arts]
