Paint colour. Hear music. Pass it on.
The Colour Organ is a small, opinionated descendant of a four-hundred-year-old idea: that colour and sound might be the same thing wearing different clothes. Athanasius Kircher sketched it in 1646. Isaac Newton committed to a number in 1704. Louis Bertrand Castel built a cabinet with candles and stained glass in 1730. Alexander Scriabin orchestrated for a non-existent instrument in 1910 and called the staff luce. None of them agreed with each other. All of them were right enough to be remembered.
This page is the smallest live instrument I could make from that lineage. You paint on a canvas. A scheduler sweeps the canvas left to right at the tempo you set. Hue picks the note, height picks the octave, brightness sets the velocity, saturation opens the filter, and grey becomes percussion. Two historical mappings are on offer: Newton, 1704, with seven diatonic colours, and Scriabin, 1910, with twelve colours arranged by the circle of fifths.
Why bother.
Most music software asks you to know things before it lets you do anything. The Colour Organ asks you to paint. A child can use it. A composer can use it. The decisions you make are decisions about colour and shape, which most people already have opinions about.
It is also a kind of small reading device. If you upload a photograph, the page will sample the photograph at the grid and play it back as a phrase. The result is not music in any confident sense. It is the photograph speaking in the language of the chosen scheme. That is occasionally beautiful and occasionally terrible. Both are useful.
Who.
Built by David T Phung. Part of the NLT143 Research series, a set of small experiments at the seams of civic data, art history, and live software. Other instruments in the series are listed on the home page.
The source is on GitHub. If you want to support the work, the donate page explains the options.
Colophon.
Next.js 14, Tailwind, Web Audio API. Type by Fraunces, Newsreader, and Space Mono.
No tracking. No analytics. No cookies. The only data the page knows is the painting in your URL.