Synesthesia-the 'Rainbow System'

The 'Rainbow System' is a totally artistic and innovative way of Synesthesia that helps us to visualize or see the music, using an art canvas.

In every music piece there are a lot of chords and melodies, or parts of them, separately or together. In our products we have tried to recreate different and random combinations between chords and tones captured into the art canvas, to have fun and provoke our imagination.
The combination between them is really vast, but we haven't try to create and visualize all the possibilities. Still, the visualization through the 'Rainbow system' gives us the possibility to touch and enjoy this sense merging between music and art.
What we need to remember is that what we represent in the music canvas here is just a fraction of the whole music possibilities for combination between chords and melody- just a moment in time of music. So, everything could appear in that moment. Musically speaking, in that fraction- every combination is possible!

 

For those, who would like to know more about it:
What is the 'Rainbow system' and how does it work?

Synesthesia is a phenomenon, based on our perceptions. It appear when stimulation of one or more of our senses provokes simultaneously and involuntary response to another of our senses. People who experience this are called synesthetes.
Said in few words Synesthesia is blending of senses, or “union of the senses“ .

Main forms of synaesthesia are as follow:

• projective synesthesia: people who see actual colors, forms, or shapes when stimulated (the widely understood version of synesthesia).
• associative synesthesia: people who feel a very strong and involuntary connection between the stimulus and the sense that it triggers.

Types of Synaesthesia are:

- Grapheme-color synesthesia- individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes) are "shaded" or "tinged" with a color
- Chromesthesia-  the association of sounds with colors.
- Spatial sequence synesthesia- tend to see numerical sequences as points in space
- Number form- A number form is a mental map of numbers that automatically and involuntarily appear whenever someone who experiences number-forms synesthesia thinks of numbers.
- Auditory-tactile synesthesia- certain sounds can induce sensations in parts of the body.
- Ordinal linguistic personification-  a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, week-day names, months and alphabetical letters are associated with personalities or genders.
- Misophonia- negative experiences (anger, fright, hatred, disgust) are triggered by specific sounds.
- Mirror-touch synesthesia- a form of synesthesia where individuals feel the same sensation that another person feels (such as touch).
- Lexical-gustatory synesthesia- certain tastes are experienced when hearing words.
- Kinesthetic synesthesia- This form of synesthesia is a combination of various different types of synesthesia.

 

What we tried to accomplish here was to find a system to visualize music in colours and shapes.
This system was called the 'Rainbow System'.

It is composed by two parts:
1. Transforming music notes to colours.
2. Transforming music notes to shapes.

1.Transforming music notes to colours:

Many people in history have tried to introduce their own system for transforming music to colours starting with Isaac Newton, Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin and many others. Everybody has a different and very personalized idea and sense of connecting sounds(notes) to colours. However, in order to develop the universe method for this we took an account on frequencies of sound and light.
Hearable sound ranges between 20Hz-20 000Hz(20kHz).; kilohertz-10³ Hz
Visible light is between 400–790 THz.; terahertz -10¹² Hz
For information 1hz is one cycle per second.

 As we know from the music theory twelve is a very nice number as it means a full circle in the music, so eventually we can make sound frequencies to correspond in numbers to light frequencies in order to achieve a system association getting rid of the 12 zeros behind the numbers for frequency of light. 

Following this logic of association between sound and colours and knowing the sound frequencies we can make the equalities, as for example:

A(La- fourth octave)-407-484Hz= 405-480Thz-approximately.
B- 484-513Hz= 480-510Thz-approximately.
C- 513-544Hz= 510-530Thz-approximately.

This are just few examples to show the logic behind the system from which we have: A(La) is Red, B(Si) is Orange-Yellow, C(Do) is Yellow-Green...

This way we discover a colour for every single tone from the octave, which contains 12 tones. These colours we can apply through the hole piano octaves as we did for creating the 'Rainbow system'...

 

2.Transforming music notes to shapes:

For transforming notes(sound) to shapes we chose the famous Chladni’s experiment, which contains in vibrating a black metal plate with sand on it. 
When the metal plate vibrates with certain frequencies the sand produces different, beautiful shapes:

There are a lot of videos on youtube for observing this awesome experimentation.

The second part of the 'Rainbow system' stands in finding the correspondence between the shape, its frequency and the tone(note) of the music which is near in frequency value. We have individualized this correspondence for the figures we work with, but we need to say that due to different factors it is an approximate values unifying system...

The way of uniting these two part into one project has led us to the artistic creation of the 'Rainbow system', which we present you with the products we offer on our website.