Tuesday, June 10, 2008

map color and sounds with feelings

I am fascinated by your extensive work with sound and color frequencies. I am
interested in constructing a sound sphere on the web and would like to request the
council of your wisdom and experience.

The idea is inspired by Paramahansa Yogananda's concept of a Worldwide Prayer Circle
and the buddhist concept of Nada Brahma or the world is sound.

In brief, the idea is to map color and sounds with feelings as expressed through the
written word. For instance if I were to say "My heart is full of gratitude" a color and a
sound value would be generated that corresponds to this statement. It is not clear to me
yet how the sounds and color should correlate to words. One idea I had was to cross
reference the statement to a chakra color, each of which have a corresponding color and
tone. If the statement was, "I feel the presence of God" this might be violet in the tone of C
or B depending on what scale I were to use. Then statement's that are not exactly aligned
with a parcticular chakra would have a lesser shade and a different corresponding tone.
This would require a symantic inferential reasoning engine.

Another take could be to associate color and tone values to each letter in the alaphabet
and then create a tone and color value for a statement based on this matrix.


About building the "machine." My colleague Robert Miller Foulkrod designed the Lambdoma Keyboard to be played using an Amiga Computer. As you probably know that computer is no longer manufactured. Robert believes that his program is obsolete and would not run on Macs or PCs. Please email Robert for more information on the specs.
Robert Foulkrod

As for your "sound sphere" on the web, what a wonderful idea!

Mapping color and sounds is relatively easy. According to Pythagoras red is the note C, orange D, yellow E, green F, blue G, indigo A, and violet B. As these notes ascend in pitch the colors lighten, and as they descend they darken according to my belief. You can translate notations to frequencies by using multiples of 2 to the numbers 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15. The number 256 is a multiple of 2 and is close to the notation middle C at 261Hz.

An octave in music is a doubling by 2 in my system. Therefore 2 times 256 C is 512C which is the octave between which fall the notes D(9). E(5), F(11), G(3), A(7) and B(15) multiplied by 2 until they fall between 256 and 512.

Mapping the above to word feelings might best be done by using the chakra system. As an example, C might be the root system or stability. D might be the 2nd chakra or creativity, E the 3rd chakra or feeling, F the 4th Chakra or love, G the throat chakra or communication, A the 3rd eye or clairvoyance and B the crown or God.

It might be easier to associate the tones and colors to the vowels of the alphabet as a start.

It sounds like a fascinating project.

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