Colour Music

An interesting concept by one of the people in my year at Uni is the link between Colour and Music. He is doing a final year project based on the link between how we associate different colours to different types of music. He has made a piece of software that plays music just like your average WinAMP, Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc with the unique feature that instead of sorting by the usual Artist, Genre or Album classification you can sort by your colour perception of the music. His software available for testing (exe) purposes and I think he welcomes downloads from as many people as possible to download and send back colour information so that he can enrich his database.

So what do I think about the idea? I think that the human brain will very quickly restrict the amount of colour variation of the music when presented with the music in that way. You will get clusters of brown, black, red and blue which really won't tell you any more than just looking at the Genre of the music. Also since the brain often needs premption the colours will come directly from the Album cover or the genre colour.


What I think would be cool is if all your music was automatically imported for you into the media player and then all the information about the music was retreived from sources on the internet (such as length of song, album covers, free music videos, etc) and this info was used to generate a classification based on some sort of complex formula then you could get some interesting "Party Shuffle" style playlists.