 |
       |
|
|
|
|
| Become an SVP lifetime member SVPMembership |
 |
| The Do-It-Yourself Unincorporated Business Trust |
|
Topic: Dale Pond
Collected Articles Section: Sound Colors Table of Contents to this Topic |
|
There are, as usual, several definitions. The first below is from Keely's work which I take to mean Keely was able to vibrate a metallic plate to where it glowed or in some other way showed various colors directly resultant from acoustic vibrations. This is the definition I would use in SVP. The other definition is from Helmholtz and is the usual definition used by musicians when they say "color" or "tone colors" as in the "tonal coloration" or "tone shading" as in slightly sharp or slight flat from a given pitch. Some years ago we made a device that would change colors depending on the acoustic pitch applied to it. Very cool! This device was fed acoutic vibrations, converted them to electrical pulses and modulated an LED panel. So it was not an accurate replication of Keely's feat of using acoustic vibrations directly to evidence visual colors. The device would show greens, yellows, blues and violet but not any reds. Without reds we couldn't find a way to market it..... Dale "Mr. Keely did experiments which enabled him to show on a disk the various colors of sound, each note having its color, and to demonstrate in various ways Mrs. Hughes' own words "that the same laws which develop musical harmonies develop the universe." [Chapter 9 of Keely and His Discoveries] "Sounds are "communicated" when they are merely conveyed from one sounding body to another, and this can take place in a noise as well as a musical sound. Sounds are "excited" under two circumstances: when a body which is sounding and that to be excited have the same note and the vibration of one produces sympathetic vibration of the other, the bodies are mutually called "reciprocating", while of the vibration of one produces its harmonics in the other, the latter is said, with regard to the exciting body, to be "resonant". According to Helmholtz, "timbre" or "quality" depends on definite combinations or certain secondary sounds or harmonics with a primary or fundamental sound, and such combinations he calls "sound colours". [A Dictionary of Musical Terms, 1900] |
| See Also: |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
