- Playing
- The Sound of Colors
- From
- Ed Herrmann
This program recreates in sound the experience of Dan Flavin's light sculptures. Using the colors of Flavin's fluorescent tubes, the frequencies are transposed down into the audible sound range. Experience green, pink, yellow, blue, and red as sound!
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Piece Description
This program recreates in sound the experience of Dan Flavin's light sculptures. Using the colors of Flavin's fluorescent tubes, the frequencies are transposed down into the audible sound range. Experience green, pink, yellow, blue, and red as sound!
Transcript
Welcome to Wake Up and Hear the Roses, the program devoted to sound and listening. Today the sound of colors.
What do colors sound like? Sound and light are both waves or vibrations, but light is vibrating much faster. The frequencies of the visible colors are way up in the TeraHertz range. That's about 40 octaves higher than sound waves.
So, play a middle C. The next C above (or an octave higher) is vibrating twice as fast. Another octave up is about as high as a soprano can sing. Two more octaves is the highest note on a piano. Go 36 more octaves higher and you reach...light, vibrating at the rate that we perceive as the color green.
Dan Flavin is an artist who works in light. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago showed a lot of Flavin's light sculptures all at once - room after room bathed in color, spilling out and blending into each other. Besides the sensual beauty, I was...
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