WHAT IS THE COLOUR OF YOUR VOICE?

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 187, 12 September 1914, Page 6

WHAT IS THE COLOUR OF YOUR VOICE?

THE NEW SCIENCE OF COLOUR. DO you think and hear in colour? Do you find, say, Sunday yellow, Wednesday brown, Friday black, and do you hear one voice as violet, another as brown, another as mauve, and so on? It seems that this subject of the association of solonr with sounds and thoughts and experiences is being looked more thoroughly into by scientists and aaedieal men; and it appears that you would be Justified, from the scientific point of view, in saying that Tuesday is green with red stripes, or that Miss So-and-So has a pink voice. Colour Music. . It is even proposed that music shoxild be represented by colour. Mere noise is held to be inadequate to represent emotion, and there are people who hold that the music of the future will be music not of sound but of rhythmic colour. One enthusiast has gone so far as to give a colour to each of the notes of the scale. Thus: Do, red; re, orange; mi, yellow; fa, green; sol, blue; la, violet-purple; ti, red-purple. It looks as if the concert of the future will be a matter entirely of colour. Instead of the first violin there will be the first yellow, and on the programme one will not read "Piano by Bechstein," but "Fireworks by Brock." In the novel "Christopher," a boy talks of "playing the sunset on the piano/' and in "Youth's Encounter" the reader is told that one of the characters * "Monday was dull red, Tuesday cream coloured, Thursday dingy purple, Friday a harsh scarlet, and Wednes- - day wjCs vivid apple-green, or was it a clear cool blue?" Red January. In an interesting article in "Science Progress," Pr I>. F. Harris,-after growing up round this colour question, gives a number of examples of colour thinking »r hearing. "One coloured thinker," he writes, "has Urns expressed himself: When I think at all definitely about the month of January the n.ime or word appears to me reddish, •whereas April is white, May yellow, the vowel "i" is. always black, the letter "o" white, and "w" indigo blue. Only by a determined effort can I think of "b" as green or blue, for me it always has been and must be black; to imagine August as Anything but white seems to me an impossibility, an altering of the inherent nature of things. He gives this amusing extract from "The Corner o£ liar ley Street": If we could use colours now to express our •lecper attitude on these occasions, as some of your 'ellow clergy wear stoics at certain seasons, with what pleasant impunity could we write to one another in yellow or purple or red, leaving black for the' editor of "The Times," or the plumber whose bills are-disputing. Colours of Numerals. Dr Harris has been looking closely into the question, and treats it with scientific gravity. Thus: AVhole words arc associated with colours in the -minds of some colour thinkers. One person says he divides all words into two great classes, the dark and the light. Random examples of dark words are —man, hill, night, horse, Ttome, London; and of light—sea, child, silver, year, day, and Cairo. Or again, another coloured thinker divides up the numerals into those associated with cold colours, grey, black, blue, „ green, and those with 'warm, red, yellow, orange, brown, jmrple, and pink. The odd numbers have the cold colours, the even the warm. In some cases, as might be expected, the coloured concepts are' appropriate or natural, as when the word scarlet is scarlet, black black, and white white. But an examination of psychochromes shows us that this reasonableness does not necessarily always occur. Thus the word "apple" is to one coloured thinker a slate grey, •which is not the colour of any real apple, and the word cucumber to the same person is white; now only the inside of the vegetable itself is white. The Blue Lady. Dr Harris mentions that some people associate a particular colour with themselves. The novelist Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler wrote to him: The colour which I always associate with myself, for no earthly reason that I can discover, is blue. Therefore "E," my initial letter, is blue; April, the month of my birthday, is blue; and 9, the date of my birthday, is blue. Dr Harris^adds gravely: "This is known as 'colour individuation,' and has been made a special study of by Paul Sokolov (47) in his paper < L 'individuation coloree,' read before the Fourth International Congress of Psychology held at Paris in 1900." When the young French poets of the symbolist movement'gave colours to all the vowels they were pretty generaWy laughed at.. Now it looks as if the new science of psychology would bring about a different attitude. With the authority of the new imaginative scientist we can be as fantastic as we like. What is the colour of a seaside holiday?