IMAGES FOR LISTENING a study on the sound-color relationship and on the possibility of translating chromatic vibrations into sound vibrations.

Listening to color; watching music; the color of sound; visual music. Painters and musicians, and more recently multimedia artists, have been looking (directly or indirectly) for the relationships existing between colors and sounds, images and music. The visual and sound universes obey to different physical laws, insomuch that the mutuality or the influence between these two worlds cannot take place on the same plane. Both are particular, a relationship between the two of them can only be of a structural nature. The musician works with the seven notes of the scale, painters have used seven colors (spectrum of the light divided into seven basic chromaticities after Newton). Sounds can be measured in frequencies and colors in wave frequencies. The two frequencies are perfectly compatible and one can therefore, speculate on a scientific reconversion, stating beforehand that sight and hearing use different languages and that sound principles are not at all like those of colors. The two frequencies (height of a sound and tone of a color) do not follow the same laws and, anyway, music takes place in time and painting in space.
Every color bears an inner sound and an emotional charge able to make the spectator’s soul vibrate. We can speak in the same way of the effect of sound: in the moment in which we listen to a musical passage, whether it is produced by an orchestra or by a single instrument or it is an environmental noise, the final effect will be both physical and psychic. We can find parallel features in the organization of both arts, in both the sound and the visual languages, in the following common ranges:
VARIATION: musical variation consists in drawing an extension, an embellishment, a prolongation in time and space out of a simple melodic line. A variation, whether it is melodic or harmonic, can be visually compared to a graphic line modified with signs or drawings . The drawn line, although visually beautiful, will not of necessity acquire the corresponding sound level, once translated into notes or into the sound language.
TIME: space and time can take on the same functions in music and images, but they can also be extremely different. In fact, when we look at an image, we can have, in that instant, a global perception of the work. In music, instead, only when the work is over, we can evaluate it.
SCORE: The graphics of the notes written on the score can resemble a graphic work. The equivalent of the spatial disposition of the sounds (and notes) represents the sound register, treble, medium and bass or thick or thin. Space can also be connected to the visualization of speed (rhythm): a slow tempo will mirror a thin, rarefied graphic plot, an almost empty space. The time will be fast with very serried graphs and a dense space.
Such deductions can be translated from the visual field into the sound world only if you set the correspondence between these two levels on a very elaborate structural plane. My program autom@tedVisualMusiC aims, besides keeping into account all the historical researches (from Arcimboldi to Kandinsky), to establish a relationship between the inner sound of each color and the sound voice that form and matter produce, with the purpose of composing a graphic-visual score, thus composing visual sound works, taking the spectator to a sound and visual play that brings about a multi-sensory perception.
The visual, sound and musical singularities will be kept, forms and colors, sounds and musical instruments, will be able to subsist, blending and yet keeping their own autonomy, and will both express a complete meaning. As far as the visual part is concerned I was inspired by the research of painter Luigi Veronesi and on behalf the musical part by the (programs) of Pietro Grossi.