The video above is a work based on my favorite riff by Mark Knopfler from the song On Every Street. If you look closely, you can see the Kalimba instrument has engravings of interval numbers and note letters on each key. The colored labels on the hand-made miniature 45 LPs correspond to these symbols. The 8 note riff starts at the top, runs clockwise and can be played as a repeating loop, just like the song.

About the Works on Display

Scroll down to videos if you read the wall text.

Premise: Music is invisible. To convey music visually, it needs to be translated into visual symbols like notes on a musical staff or language-based symbols like note names (A-B-C) or interval numbers (1-2-3). Symbols need to be learned.  In contrast, color is experienced directly... just like music.  You don’t need to learn how to see color or hear music.  You just need to learn to connect the two for color to convey music.

The inspiration for this series came from an experience I had while learning the fretboard of the guitar. I started color coding charts to see the patterns better, and my learning accelerated so quickly and effortlessly if didn’t feel like a "me" thing. It felt like a "brain" thing, that my brain was already hard wired to make these connections.

There are two categories of work in the series.  Both use the "language of color" as a bridge.  

1) Music: Some works start off as musical melodies that I translate into color-based musical scores.  The colorful objects used to convey the notes (Hz) are as accurate as sheet music.  These works can be played on an instrument or sung.  

2) Math: Other works start off as mathematical sequences / numbers that I translate into the language of color.  These works are accurate representations of the original numbers and can be recited just like you could recite numerals on a page.  They can also be translated into notes and then played or sung.

The color chart below is the 12 note chromatic scale that shows the correlation between colors, interval numbers and note letters used to create these works.

The video below is based on the same color chart.  You will first hear the 7 notes of the diatonic scale then the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. As each note rings, the corresponding color/ thread spool rises up to a specific height based on hertz.  

The thread spool animations (and there are more of them) light-heartedly connect the new works to my series of thread spool installations I created over the years.   LINK TO THREAD SPOOL WORKS

Video below of my dog playing the 8 note riff on his musical instrument.  I kid you not.

Click thumbnail block below to access individual works on home page

Art that Bridges the Universal Languages of Music, Math, and Color

In the time of the Ancient Greeks, music was not seen as an art but rather as a quantitative science that was used as a mathematical and philosophical description of how the universe was perceived to be constructed.