Every Song has a Color
We often think of our senses as being separate from one another, but often our senses can blend. We can taste food better because we can smell and sometimes songs can take on entirely new meaning because of other experiences. When creating an album a designer must determine which images and colors best fit the theme of the songs within the album.
One interesting study by Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School entitled Music-color Associations are Mediated by Emotion, examined the link between music and colors. Researchers asked their participants to choose from a color grid of 37 colors that they felt went best with a music clip. The participants did this with four different music clips. When putting the colors together that each person chose for their respective song a pattern began to immerge. Bright and vivid colors were selected for one song, and cool colors and others still produced a mixture of light and dark colors.
The tone pacing and sound of the piece seemed to have an influence over which colors were selected. A melancholy piece was more likely to be paired with cool colors, and energetic pieces were more often paired with bright, vivid colors. Simply put, there was an association between sounds and colors. It’s difficult to tell if the color association is purely learned or if we are capable of associating these particular colors with certain sounds naturally.
Another interesting thought about this research is that it helps us understand the complexity of our minds and the associations that can form between different subject matter. Perhaps, with more research, we will better be able to understand, and by extension utilize, these neurological pathways and make better use of the associations our mind forms for schooling and memory tasks.