Musical Color Harmony: Application of the Principles of Musical Harmony to Produce Color Hue Sets

Abstract Aesthetic response to the visual harmony of color combinations is a very personal and widely differing subjective experience. To the contrary, musical harmony - consonance and dissonance - are mathematically defined and certain combinations of notes exhibit near universal aesthetic agreement across the globe. Although numerous metaphysicians, philosophers, scientists, poets, artists, and musicians have speculated on the existence of a relationship between color and music for over 2000 years, the establishment of a correlation between color and musical harmony has been elusive. The author describes a framework, Musical Color Hue Harmony (MCHH), initially developed for video display systems, that correlates musical and color harmonic consonance and dissonance by applying the physics of aural harmonic resonance and theories of musical harmony to produce sets of “harmonious” color hues based on the mathematically defined frequency relationships between two or more musical pitches. The methodology is applicable to any musical tuning system and any color hue wheel configuration. Color attributes of brightness/luminance and saturation/chroma are presently beyond the scope of the framework.