Color and Sound
A color to frequency converter that gives you the harmonics and sub-harmonics of a color.
Now, I realize there’s a lot arbitraryness to it. This isn’t “the true sound of color.” I’m not really sure if that’s definitively possible… It’s a playful mapping: hue -> wavelength -> light frequency -> scaled down into a musical range so you can hear relationships.
We convert the selected color to HSL, take hue ℎ, map it to an approximate visible wavelength 𝜆 from 700→380 nm, convert that to a light frequency using 𝑓=𝑐/𝜆, then linearly remap that enormous frequency range into an audible band (200–1000 Hz).
Why? Well a friend was throwing an ambient solstice party and had invited me to play and part of it was that part of the events theme was the color celeste, which is a light blue. We were discussing frequencies and I’d started using chatGPT for one off random coding adventures and we’d decided it would be fun to find out what that could sound like… and an hr later, this was the result.
Later feature creep would set in, and it morphed into Synesthesiac, which is a color based sequencer, that takes a 16×16 pixel sprite and converts the colors into frequencies that are then fed into a simple 3 oscilator javascript synth. It needs some work, but it’s fun to muck about with.