A mapping between musical notes and colors

bpert said:

If you take A = 440 Hz and keep doubling and doubling until you get into the range of light you will find ROYGBIV = F, G, A, Bb, B, C, D, E, F. Try it yourself.

So I did!  If you take the frequencies of each note in Hz (in equal temperament) and multiply them by 240 (40 octaves), you get a number in the THz, which would fall into the visual range if it represented the frequency of an electromagnetic wave instead of a sound wave. “A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 390 to 750 nm.” Does it match up with ROYGBIV? Kinda.

Note Freq (Hz) +40 oct. (THz) Wavelength (nm) R G B Color HTML name
F♯4 370 407 737 174 0 0 dark red
G4 392 431 696 255 0 0 red
G♯4 415 457 657 255 0 0 red
A4 440 484 620 255 102 0 orange-red
B♭4 466 513 585 255 239 0 yellow
B4 494 543 552 153 255 0 chartreuse
C5 523 575 521 40 255 0 lime
C♯5 554 610 492 0 255 242 aqua
D5 587 646 464 0 122 255 sky blue
D♯5 622 684 438 5 0 255 blue
E5 659 725 414 71 0 237 blue
F5 698 768 390 99 0 178 indigo

I used this Python code to generate the RGB values for each wavelength, and Wolfram Alpha to find the nearest named HTML color.  Should find the nearest color names from the XKCD color survey instead (and “nearest” should be defined as distance in L*a*b* space, not in RGB space).

Since the starting point of F♯ is arbitrary, basically all this means is that our visual range covers about 1 octave.  Our audible range is 9–10 octaves, for comparison.

45 thoughts on “A mapping between musical notes and colors

  1. This is interesting… The use of colors in teaching pitch sensitivity has been recognized as an effective way of teaching music. I am personally using the method in a program I an writing to teach notes on the guitar. I am attempting to “gamify” guitar learning in a similar way to how popular video games function. Using colors was the basic idea, but I think using this color seq

  2. INTERESTED TO KNOW MORE INFO HAVE ALWAYS WONDERED THIS MYSELF AND I THINK I HAVE A NATURAL TALENT NEEDED TO BE EXPLORED TO CONNECT MUSIC AND ART/COLOUR I SOON WILL BE TEACHING BLIND AND HAVE DONE IN THE PAST HOW WONDERFUL WOULD IT BE IF I WAS TO USE MUSIC TO TEACH ART AND COLOUR AMAZING
    I HAVE BEEN TEACHING MANY YEARS AND NOW AM ART THERAPY TRAINED AND WORK WITH SPECIAL NEEDS
    CHEERS DEBORAH

    • Hi Deborah, if you automatically associate colours to musical notes you probably ha e something called synesthesia (you also probably are already aware of this, but I’m mentioning it just in case because I’ve only now found out it’s something not everyone can do and it’s blown my mind)

    • A 440 is close. Find exact freq to as many decimal points as possible rc..

      oh no if we could all pool research if there are 10 octaves that we here and what octave that we see possibly each octave me here we’ll have some number variation Point whatever and some color variation or text her or something we need to test it on actual human beings or things in the physical world to see if there is a change Ronnie …. Oh I have an idea that’s experiment memorizing perfect pitch from Seattle’s net have been generated intervals starting at 432 someone has to find the exact point numbers and see if it’s easier that way because that’s supposed to be the natural multiple multiples of physical space matter time

      compare those that have try to learn Perfect Pitch some colors generated a 440 as the Hub to those generated a 4:32.????hatever is physically solid. Get back to me on the website for this do it do it at musiqdoc10@gmail.com or Facebook Ronnie cea

      • I have used color and music to escape the severity of pain. Have there been any studies on such as it relates to neurotransmitters when both are used in tandem? Joannecrosby

        • Just a mention: Sonic Frequencies are being used to treat Tinnitus, so I would imagine that in other applications, like using it to treat pain, this is being studied or could use more study. I’ve looked into Chakras and their colors and I believe there is a relationship or correlation between music, sound, light, (waves) and laser – I can see a hand-hand device that heals the body while it scans it with sound, color and light in harmonic pitch with wellness. Just a thought or visualization. I don’t think this is a new concept.

  3. I’ve been looking for something like this for YEARS!!! I’m glad I’m not the only one that thought it was possible. Now all that has to happen is for it to be thrust into the general populous!

    As other people have said, this will make an EXCELLENT learning tool.

    Although, I’m surprised to see that both G and G# are red, but I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles, so to speak.

  4. I came across your site looking for a conversion of wavelength to RGB! I came up with the same values notes to visible light wavelength using Excel.

    P.S. My family name is “Endo”

    • Cool. My screen name has absolutely nothing to do with my real name. 🙂 It’s a type of archaea/bacteria.

  5. I have been working on a color scheme that is working very well for myself and my students. Im still looking for corralations with roy g biv. My colors are easy to remember especially if you like or play golf. It goes like this, “Your tee-ing off first you look out and get Clear(A) on where your going to hit that ball. Your ball disappears into the Black(B). But lucky for you it lands on the Green(C) There is a Red(D) White(E) Blue(F) Flag in the hole sitting in a Gold(G) cup…… Try these colors for yourself and see if it helps….

  6. i was listening to fm radio in tucson. they were interviewing musical prodigies. a young woman said she visualizes different colors to different notes. naturally. the whole group of youngsters were amazing, and i thought what wonders!

  7. Pingback: Piano de colores y texturas de Xul Solar | sonopuntura

  8. I would love to “hear” some Van Gough, using a painting as a “score”. Different strokes of the same color and placement on the painting gives us the length of notes, the key centers and where certain keys come back.

    Or use the RGB to break down chords? White is C- or Ab Major = G,G# Red, C Green, D# (or Eb) Blue. A major chord or it’s relative minor!

    Now reverse and visualize Beethoven’s 9th!!! Ha!

    What kind of symphony or painting or video could be created by mathematical equations twisting our information intake to a different sense?

  9. Endolith, How different really is Chromesthesia from Chromoacoustics? Think of it as energy being interpreted by our brains in more than one center (format) and thusly tied into a different conscious perception. You are correct they are not the exact same but related they are! And how!

    • Super! I was trying to take the human consciousness to a higher level. Doing the note at the same time as the color and possibly other sense which are all related to frequencies. I’ve been told there is a sacred key because it relates to harmonic multiples of physical things. can you map out colors if a was for 32 and everything else relative and not do it on an equal temperament instrument as the piano I’m told a guitar any other string that does not have the temperament forced on it may the overtones in different places although slightly different it may matter to our psyche thank you Ronnie C Musiq doc 10 at gmail.com please answer

  10. What about Newton’s color circle from his book named Opticks? There he assigns colors to musical notes.

    • Re. .Math to color for notes. And hoe to get hue right on medium available! .I was trying to take the human consciousness to a higher level. Doing the note at the same time as the color and possibly other sense which are all related to frequencies. I’ve been told there is a sacred key because it relates to harmonic multiples of physical things. can you map out colors if a was for 32 and everything else relative and not do it on an equal temperament instrument as the piano I’m told a guitar any other string that does not have the temperament forced on it may the overtones in different places although slightly different it may matter to our psyche thank you Ronnie C Musiq doc 10 at gmail.com please answer

  11. if you do the same math with A=432 and use medium wavelength of each color, you get a reversed version of this color scale (c= dark red and f#-g=green). Dividing by Pythagorean fifths yields interesting scales, as well.

  12. Similar to ChrisT42. I’ve been trying to get the HEX code or RGB code for the Solfeggio frequencies used in ancient music. It’s basically the same you have listed here for A=440Hz, except the tonal centre changes to A=444Hz or A=432Hz. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong and you seem to have figured it out. The frequencies are:
    UT – 396Hz
    RE – 417Hz
    MI – 528Hz
    FA – 639Hz
    SOL – 741
    LA – 852
    TI – 963

    A couple others that fall out of the THz to NM range are 174Hz, 285Hz … 1174Hz and 1285Hz. I keep getting the wrong answers. I found that 528Hz is lime green HEX code BYE202 and RGB code 176,226,2 for a reference.

    They’re supposed to have healing and spiritual significance. I just wanna change my Facebook background to these colours. Can you please look into this. If I get them first I’ll leave them with you.

  13. This is great! I had written someyhing similar years ago. Unfortunately it was stored on a disc that was corrupted. Working on ideas for a painting project.
    Painting while listing to symphonic music.
    Reading in depth about Kadinski and relation to music and art.
    In addition, Kandinsky was considered a “synthe”, he could colors as sound. He believed there was communication between the artist and viewer as being available to both the senses and the mind (synesthesia). Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized, as an example, yellow is the colour for middle C on a brassy trumpet.  Black is the colour of closure, and the end of phrases. Also, that combinations of colours produce vibrational frequencies, akin to chords played on a piano.
    My task before this Friday is to match the frequency of notes to the frequency of colors on visual light spectrum. Wrote a program for this a few years back. Time to dust it off and fire it up.
    Time! Time should have a frequency as well. Another project.

    • Oh yes…do! and we have to nail down the exact a 4:40 and not use it on the equal tempered forced instrument the piano someone’s got to do it on the strings that vibrate where they physically naturally Wood. Ronnie C someone needs to make a website where we can all pool/brainstorm experiment outcomes and theorys.

      I’m a musician and also have a hobby of anti-gravity ‘everything is frequency’ those are my papers.

      Ronnie Cea musiqdoc10@gmail.com

      Lets get a professor at a university to get on board and bring all levels of musicians to this science. how about a concert where I really levitate the audience haha yea baby! Said professor though will in no way trump anyones research since this is information and a science that has not yet been nailed down and or taught.

    • Time is represented by tempo and by time signature, both of which are the exact same thing as pitch.

      A polyrhythm of 15/8 sped up until it is happening say 100 times a second, is the interval of a major 7th. It is the exact same relationship as the note ratios, and polyrhythms create harmonies of the same ratio when sped up (eg, a 4 on 3 polyrhythm has a 4:3 ratio, the same as a perfect 4th)

      All rhythm is the same thing as notes, it is just played at frequencies lower than about 15 hertz. If you were able to hit a drum fast enough so that you were hitting it 440 times a second, it would sound exactly like concert pitch A 440. If you make a metronome click that fast, it does the same thing.

      All sounds are just waves of constant periodicity. When that periodicity falls below 20 hertz, we can no longer hear pitch, and will instead hear the individual peaks and valleys as beats. When it gets so fast that the periodicity is above 20,000 hertz, we can no longer perceive it as sound, but that does not mean that it is no longer a pitch. Somewhere in the 28k range is a very high note that we cannot hear, yet your dog would be able to, because it is the range of a dog whistle. To the dog, it has pitch.

      Pitch is merely an extremely fast ticking of a clock. A guitar string, when plucked, wobbles back and forth. When it does so 440 times a second, we call that A. One single beat per second is 1 hertz. Two beats per second is 2 hertz. Etcetera. A tempo of 120 bpm is the same thing as the frequency of 2 hertz, because it is 2 beats per second, or 120 beats per minute. When tempo is at 720 beats per minute, it has a frequency of 12 hertz, 12 beats per second. At a tempo of 26,400 bpm, you have a frequency of 440 beats per second, which is concert A. It very literally makes this tone, an audible note, and it is nothing more than a metronome click.

      Time and pitch are the exact same thing, as pitch is merely a unit of time, and time is a measurement of pitch.

      Look up musical fractals on youtube, and Adam Neely will go more in depth about how time, rhythm, and pitch are all the exact same thing.

  14. That’s funny because I started imagining colors as I started to get really good at improvising on guitar. I always saw A as a red (darker if minor) and E as a deep blue, etc. This list is actually pretty close. I wonder if this is a natural perception that just comes up eventually or, perhaps, years of playing with photoshop has created some sort of connection in my subconscious (probably the latter, haha).

    Anyway, thanks for taking the time to put this together!

    (You can go to YouTube and search “eric patton looping” if you want to see how I improvise music…)

  15. I wonder if the colors would line up more traditionally if you used the Verdi tuning, basing the “A” note at 432 hz. That’s what they use for the cymatic geometric shapes.

  16. I Can’t say for sure why but I have this natural feeling that this is wrong. In my completely uneducated and ignorant opinion F should be green and A should be a full red. C and G tie to be a possible blue. I mean this coordination can be changed to fit the key (this example assumes I am referring to the key of C) so like… note four would be green and whatnot. I know this is based completely off of what I feel, but I just wanted to insert my wacky contradiction that holds no water whatsoever.

  17. Pingback: ¿Existe un código de colores para las notas?

  18. While I like many since the ancients like the idea of music and light being the same. I think you’ve made the same mistake many people have made in their attempts. You see, a color wheel has the opposite to Green as Magenta. So what ever green is note wise, its complimentary opposite should be magenta. Any color wheel includes magenta across green and its one of the 3 secondary colors. You excluded it for the same reason it should be included. It doesn’t exist, but it does. There is no frequency for it, yet it sits across from Green.
    I have a similar wheel, except mine accounts for this, and my colors are aligned differently. But just assuming any value, lets say magenta at 12 o clock, is A. That would make Green at 6 o clock a D#. So, you quickly can see that what is a complimentary color arrangement, in music, is a devil’s tritone. A’s perfect 5th is E at the 7 o clock position.
    So if you hold an A5 power chord and trill (Pull off and hammer on repeatedly) between the E and D# while the A root rings out, you are switching between a perfect color and a perfect music combination.
    Lets take this further, if 12 is December, Winter Solstice is in Dec. Where as at 6, it would be June, when Summer Solstice happens. (When sun is at peak in the sky). Now, we can see the sun is at the green 6 o clock position. Fun fact, our sun is not white, it is green. Green stars appear white though since color spectrum peaks in green while providing enough red and blue that our cones register it as white. Red is a cool temp star while Blue is a hot one, so green should be at the middle.
    Magenta doesn’t exist, so its black. I can actually relate this beyond music, light, and astrology. I can relate this to soooo much more and plan to do a youtube video at least about it all. Its very complex and a lot to explain and relate.

  19. Also, A4 is 440hz, but A# is 466.16hz. That is much closer to red at 460Thz. Equaling 1.6Ev.
    460×10^12=460Thz Your doubling idea only works for getting A to different Octaves, not for getting it to light. You need to stick with the squaring law. This is how sound waves and light waves dissipate over time. Its also how they calculate electron shells. Or any sphere. Take Newtons Gravity. F=GM1+M2/4piR^2.

    B4 is 493.88Hz while Orange is around 510THz. C4 is 523.25Thz.

    These are rough numbers as the Red range for example isn’t just at 1 frequency level but across a frequency range. Red is around 650-700nm with 650nm being 460Thz

    There is also the issue of 440 vs 428 tuning, which musically produces no effect other than just being lower. Its the relationship between intervals that matters, not which frequency you pick as your start. This goes deeper if you go into microtones also.

    Consider what i said about Magenta being a dead color though and the perfect color and perfect music combinations being a half step off no matter how you pick you starting frequency. That half step difference i think is important to other scientific factors about our universe and may be an effect of everything being a sine wave. Their is always duality.
    Take pi. Its both 3.14, but its also only .5 as it takes 2pi to create a whole circle at 100 percent.

    • has anyone ever created a software that matches colors with musical notes so that a color image can be created from the written notes? chords would be a blend of several colors and could be displayed on a video screen. It would be interesting to see what the picture would look like. You could carry it further by softening the colors tones when “piano” is indicated and darker (or thicker) if fortissimo is indicated. The length of each color would be determined by the length of each note in a song sheet. wouldn’t it be eerie if for instance tying the notes with color in “Amazing Grace” would produce a picture of Jesus? It would also be cool if an orchestra could perform a symphony and at the same time a video screen above the orchestra would show the color translation of that music. It would be an audio and visual experience.
      What do you think?

      • I’m afraid that “soft” for sound is not “soft” for light. “Soft” for sound is “dark” for light and “soft” for light is “hissing” for sound.

        Dark colours are actually the opposite of fortissimo. Black is the colour of silence, you see. No light = no sound.

        It’s fine to have colour schemes with soft sounds being soft colours, and loud sounds being dark colours, but it doesn’t align with actual light-sound correspondences.

  20. I see that this thread has been going for a number of years. Here’s an article I wrote with the assistance of Richard Haiden, who I cannot find any longer.

    The article describes the mathematical relationship between musical notes and pure colors in a manner that is substantially different above.

    Here’s the contents of the article, and below, that is a link to an image.

    &&&&&&&&&&

    Symphony
    by René Schmidt
    Light and Sound Consider, for a moment, these common co-inhabitants of our universe. We think nothing of them, take them for granted, expect them simply to be a part of our daily lives. Yet, when they are manifested in their more defined forms of color and music, these energies become things of beauty.
    CREEN 5110%
    207X1012H7
    Color and Music These two seemingly dissimilar systems are more closely linked than you might imagine. While light and sound are both parts of an energy continuum (the electromagnetic spectrum), which ranges from brain waves to cosmic rays, there is an inexplicable link between color and music that boggles the mind.
    YELLOW
    GREEN
    190,
    The Magical Link Some might call this mystery a coincidence, others will insist on a Divine Plan, but the fact of the matter remains: If you take the frequency of any musical note in the Western scale and multiply it by 101, the result is the EXACT wavelength of one of the twelve cardinal colors. Keep in mind that while light and sound are natural ocurrences, the concepts of “color” and “music” are purely a human interpretation.
    A Matter of Measure Sound is measured in “hertz” (cycles per second) and light is measured in “angstroms” (one ten-billionth of a meter).
    These totally disparate systems of measurement have nothing to do with each other one measures speed, another measures size. Yet when the two stems are synthesized as in the above example, the parallel between the two systems is unmistakable.
    The Spectral Symphony So what does it all mean? Are we, as humans, simply imposing our own structures upon the natural, physical laws of the Universe? Or perhaps, as sages throughout time have surmised, do our constructions mirror the Underlying Order Of Things? It matters not. Just take comfort in the knowledge that the Universal Language (mathematics) translates the Purity of Color into the Beauty of Music.

    &&&&&&&&&&

    Link to image of article and illustration:
    https://share.icloud.com/photos/0a99cyyzVEFPaRIb5NnMqzSqA

    • The copy and paste includes some errors, the correct formula is musical note frequency multiplied by 10 to the 12th power equals light wave frequency

  21. Hello endolith,

    I am a music producer & artist called Realms. I am currently experimenting with connections between visible human light spectrum X colour correlation to music notes X numerolgy. I am inspired by the work of Tesla, Newton, Alessandro Botticelli, rn, also Henri Matisse (Matisse being my human name)
    I am also studying ++ experimenting with colour at this time.
    Noticed you are an electrician & music producer, just the person I would like to speak with 🙂

    Interested to know what you have to say about this short video demonstrated by David Attenborough

    I noticed the flower reading is G4, as the bee approaches pitch drops one full octave to G3 before rising back to G4. Do U think that perfect octave translated to sound, is representative of human vision only perceiving equivalent to one octave of colour, within the light spectrum ?

    https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2Nj7NBPYf7/?igsh=MXhvbmVsOG9xZTR3MA==

    ⭐????????

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