Synesthetic Design of Music Visualization Based on Examples from the Sound-Color-Space Project

Abstract

The term synesthetic design, and its practical application to the visualization of music, will be discussed in relation to synesthetic phenomena. A brief summary of the history of Sound Light Music follows, with an example from Wassily Kandinsky, which in turn provided the impulse to build an instrument to “change colors into sounds.” Together with the Color Light Organ (Fig. 12.1), designed especially for this study, the Sound-Color-Space Project illustrates the relationship among sound, color and space in novel ways. In conclusion, three synesthetic examples of music visualization demonstrate various possibilities of visualization software.