The term color organ refers to a tradition of mechanical devices built to represent sound and accompany music in a visual medium. The earliest created color organs were manual instruments based on the harpsichord design. By the 1900s they were electromechanical. In the early 20th century, a silent color organ tradition (Lumia) developed. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term "color organ" became popularly associated with electronic devices that responded to their music inputs with light shows. The term "light organ" is increasingly being used for these devices; allowing "color organ" to reassume its original meaning.
The dream of creating a visual music comparable to auditory music found its fulfillment in animated abstract films by artists such as Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye and Norman McLaren; but long before them, many people built instruments, usually called "color organs," that would display modulated colored light in some kind of fluid fashion comparable to music.
In 1590, Gregorio Comanini described an invention by the Mannerist painter Arcimboldo of a system for creating color-music, based on apparent luminosity (light-dark contrast) instead of hue.
In 1725, French Jesuit monk Louis Bertrand Castel proposed the idea of Clavecin pour les yeux (Ocular Harpsichord). In the 1740s, German composer Telemann went to France to see it, composed some pieces for it and wrote a book about it. It had 60 small colored glass panes, each with a curtain that opened when a key was struck. In about 1742, Castel proposed the clavecin oculaire (a light organ) as an instrument to produce both sound and the 'proper' light colors.
In 1877, US artist, inventor Bainbridge Bishop gets a patent for his first Color Organ.[2] The instruments were lighted attachments designed for pipe organs that could project colored lights onto a screen in synchronization with musical performance. Bishop built three of the instruments; each was destroyed in a fire, including one in the home of P. T. Barnum.[3]
In a 1916 art manifesto, the Italian Futurists Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra described their experiments with "color organ" projection in 1909. They also painted nine abstract films, now lost.
In 1918, American concert pianist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt created an instrument she called the Sarabet. Also an inventor, she patented nine inventions related to her instrument, including the rheostat.
In 1921, Arthur C. Vinageras proposed the Chromopiano, an instrument resembling and played like a grand piano, but designed to project "chords" composed from colored lights.
In the 1920s, Danish-born Thomas Wilfred created the Clavilux,[8] a color organ, ultimately patenting seven versions. By 1930, he had produced 16 "Home Clavilux" units. Glass disks bearing art were sold with these "Clavilux Juniors". Wilfred coined the word lumia to describe the art. Significantly, Wilfred's instruments were designed to project colored imagery, not just fields of colored light as with earlier instruments.
In 1925, Hungarian composer Alexander Laszlo wrote a text called Color-Light-Music; Laszlo toured Europe with a color organ.
In Hamburg, Germany from the late 1920s–early 1930s, several color organs were demonstrated at a series of Colour-Sound Congresses (German:Kongreß für Farbe-Ton-Forschung).[9]Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack performed his Farbenlichtspiel colour organ at these congresses and at several other festivals and events in Germany. He had developed this color organ at the Bauhaus school in Weimar, with Kurt Schwerdtfeger.
The 1939 London Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition featured a "72-way Light Console and Compton Organ for Colour Music", as well as a 70feet, 230kW "Kaleidakon" tower.[10]
From 1935 to 1977, Charles Dockum built a series of Mobilcolor Projectors, his versions of silent color organs.
In the late 1940s, Oskar Fischinger created the Lumigraph that produced imagery by pressing objects/hands into a rubberized screen that would protrude into colored light. The imagery of this device was manually generated, and was performed with various accompanying music. It required two people to operate: one to make changes to colors, the other to manipulate the screen. Fischinger performed the Lumigraph in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1940s through early 1950s. The Lumigraph was licensed by the producers of the 1964 sci-fi film, The Time Travelers. The Lumigraph does not have a keyboard, and does not generate music.
In 2000, Jack Ox and David Britton created "The Virtual Color Organ". The 21st Century Virtual Reality Color Organ is a computational system for translating musical compositions into visual performance. It uses supercomputing power to produce 3D visual images and sound from Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) files and can play a variety of compositions. Performances take place in interactive, immersive, virtual reality environments such as the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), VisionDome, or Immersadesk. Because it is a 3D immersive world, the Color Organ is also a place—that is, a performance space.[11]
Further study
California Institute of the Arts scholar William Moritz has documented color organs as a form of visual music, particularly as a precursor to visual music cinema. His papers and original research are in the collection of the Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles, which also has other historical color organ papers and resources.[1]
Light organ – an electronic device which automatically converts an audio signal into rhythmic light effects, which was popular in 1970s discotheques.
Jack Ox and David Britton's Virtual Color Organ – a computational system for translating musical compositions into visual performance.
Related Research Articles
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. This activates a row of levers that turn a trigger mechanism that plucks one or more strings with a small plectrum made from quill or plastic. The strings are under tension on a soundboard, which is mounted in a wooden case; the soundboard amplifies the vibrations from the strings so that the listeners can hear it. Like a pipe organ, a harpsichord may have more than one keyboard manual, and even a pedal board. Harpsichords may also have stop buttons which add or remove additional octaves. Some harpsichords may have a buff stop, which brings a strip of buff leather or other material in contact with the strings, muting their sound to simulate the sound of a plucked lute.
A musical keyboard is the set of adjacent depressible levers or keys on a musical instrument. Keyboards typically contain keys for playing the twelve notes of the Western musical scale, with a combination of larger, longer keys and smaller, shorter keys that repeats at the interval of an octave. Pressing a key on the keyboard makes the instrument produce sounds—either by mechanically striking a string or tine, plucking a string (harpsichord), causing air to flow through a pipe organ, striking a bell (carillon), or, on electric and electronic keyboards, completing a circuit. Since the most commonly encountered keyboard instrument is the piano, the keyboard layout is often referred to as the piano keyboard.
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument played using a keyboard, a row of levers which are pressed by the fingers. The most common of these are the piano, organ, and various electronic keyboards, including synthesizers and digital pianos. Other keyboard instruments include celestas, which are struck idiophones operated by a keyboard, and carillons, which are usually housed in bell towers or belfries of churches or municipal buildings.
Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music videos. He created special effects for Fritz Lang's 1929 Woman in the Moon, one of the first sci-fi rocket films, and influenced Disney's Fantasia. He made over 50 short films and painted around 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries, and collections worldwide. Among his film works is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which is now listed on the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress.
The clavier à lumières, or tastiera per luce, as it appears in the score, was a musical instrument invented by Alexander Scriabin for use in his work Prometheus: Poem of Fire. Only one version of this instrument was constructed, for the performance of Prometheus: Poem of Fire in New York City in 1915. The instrument was supposed to be a keyboard, with notes corresponding to colors as given by Scriabin's synesthetic system, specified in the score. However, numerous synesthesia researchers have cast doubt on the claim that Scriabin was a synesthete.
Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, Op. 60 (1910), is a tone poem by the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin for piano, orchestra, optional choir, and clavier à lumières or "Chromola". Prometheus is only loosely based on the myth of Prometheus. It premiered in Moscow on 2 March 1911. A typical performance lasts about 20 minutes.
Mary Elizabeth Hallock-Greenewalt was an inventor and pianist who performed with the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh symphonies as a soloist. She is best known for her invention of a type of visual music she called Nourathar.
Toshio Iwai is a Japanese interactive media and installation artist who has also created a number of commercial video games. In addition he has worked in television, music performance, museum design and digital musical instrument design.
Louis Bertrand Castel was a French mathematician born in Montpellier, who entered the order of the Jesuits in 1703. Having studied literature, he afterwards devoted himself entirely to mathematics and natural philosophy. After moving from Toulouse to Paris in 1720, at the behest of Bernard de Fontenelle, Castel acted as the science editor of the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux.
Visual music, sometimes called colour music, refers to the creation of a visual analogue to musical form by adapting musical structures for visual composition, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation. An expanded definition may include the translation of music to painting; this was the original definition of the term, as coined by Roger Fry in 1912 to describe the work of Wassily Kandinsky. There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, visual music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of visual music. Visual music has also been defined as a form of intermedia.
William Moritz, film historian, specialized in visual music and experimental animation. His principal published works concerned abstract filmmaker and painter Oskar Fischinger. He also wrote extensively on other visual music artists who worked with motion pictures, including James and John Whitney and Jordan Belson; Moritz also published on German cinema, Visual Music, color organs, experimental animation, avant-garde film and the California School of Color Music.
Algorithmic art or algorithm art is art, mostly visual art, in which the design is generated by an algorithm. Algorithmic artists are sometimes called algorists.
Thomas Wilfred, born Richard Edgar Løvstrøm, was a musician and inventor. He is best known for his light art, which he named lumia, and his designs for color organs called Clavilux. Wilfred was not fond of the term "color organ", and coined the word "Clavilux" from Latin meaning "light played by key". His innovative, kinetic works prefigured the advent of light art in America, and influenced subsequent generations of visual artists.
Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. For example, in a form of synesthesia known as grapheme-color synesthesia, letters or numbers may be perceived as inherently colored. Historically, the most commonly described form of synesthesia has been between sound and vision, e.g. the hearing of colors in music.
The phrase synesthesia in art has historically referred to a wide variety of artists' experiments that have explored the co-operation of the senses in the genres of visual music, music visualization, audiovisual art, abstract film, and intermedia. The age-old artistic views on synesthesia have some overlap with the current neuroscientific view on neurological synesthesia, but also some major differences, e.g. in the contexts of investigations, types of synesthesia selected, and definitions. While in neuroscientific studies synesthesia is defined as the elicitation of perceptual experiences in the absence of the normal sensory stimulation, in the arts the concept of synaesthesia is more often defined as the simultaneous perception of two or more stimuli as one gestalt experience. The usage of the term synesthesia in art should, therefore, be differentiated from neurological synesthesia in scientific research. Synesthesia is by no means unique to artists or musicians. Only in the last decades have scientific methods become available to assess synesthesia in persons. For synesthesia in artists before that time one has to interpret (auto)biographical information. For instance, there has been debate on the neurological synesthesia of historical artists like Kandinsky and Scriabin. Additionally, Synesthetic art may refer to either art created by synesthetes or art created to elicit synesthetic experience in the general audience.
Clavilux is the term coined by the artist Thomas Wilfred to refer to his mechanical invention that allowed the creation and performance of lumia, which was Wilfred's term for light art.
Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
Lumia is a form of art that uses light; originally associated with music but was later associated with painting. The term was coined by a twentieth-century artist, Thomas Wilfred. In the early twentieth century, artists began to promote colors and light together in their works. Wilfred worked towards establishing lumia as a new form of art, but the medium has yet to achieve popular recognition.
Jack Ox is an intermedia artist and an acknowledged pioneer of music visualization.
Alexander Wallace Rimington (1854–1918), ARE, RBA, Hon. FSA was an etcher, painter, illustrator, author and Professor of Fine Arts at Queen's College, London. He also invented a keyboard instrument that was designed to project different colours in harmony with music.
↑ Rimington, Alexander Wallace, Colour-Music The Art Of Mobile Colour. Hutchinson, London, 1912
↑ Brougher, Kerry; Judith Zilczer; Jeremy Strick; Ari Wiseman; Olivia Mattis (2005). Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900. Thames & Hudson.
Kenneth Peacock, "Instruments to Perform Color-Music: Two Centuries of Technological Exploration." [Leonardo, Vol. 21, No.4, 1988, pp.397–406]
Tonino Tornitore, "Giuseppe Arcimboldi E Il Suo Presunto Clavicembalo Oculare." [Revue des Etudes Italiennes, Vol. 31, No. 1–4, 1985, pp.58–77]
Austin B. Caswell, The Pythagoreanism of Arcimboldo. [The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 39, No. 2, Winter 1980, pp.155–161]
Gregorio Comanini, "Il Figino, overo del fine della pittura." [Trattati D'Arte Del Cinquecento: Fra Manerismo E Controrifroma, Volume Terzo Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 1962, pp.238–379]
Klein, Adrian Bernard, 'Coloured Light An Art Medium' 3rd ed. The Technical Press, London, 1937
Ox, Jack, & Britton, Dave. (2000). The 21st Century Virtual Reality Color Organ. IEEE MultiMedia, Journal of IEEE Computer Society, 7(3), pp.2–5.
Ox, Jack. (2001). 2 Performances in the 21st Century Virtual Organ: Gridjam and Im Januar am Nil. Paper presented at the Seventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia: Enhance realities: Augmented and Unplugged, Center for Design Visualization, UC Berkeley.
Ox, Jack. (2002). The Color Organ and Collaboration. In L. Candy & E. A. Edmonds (Eds.), Explorations in Art and Technology (pp.211–218, 302). London, UK: Springer.
Ox, Jack. (2002). Keynote speaker; Two Performances in the 21st Century Virtual Color Organ. Paper presented at the Creativity and Cognition, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK.
Ox, Jack. (2005). Gridjam. Paper presented at the Creativity and Cognition 2005, London, UK.
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