Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Colour

Alexander Wallace Rimington pioneered the synthesis of colour and music, marrying the arts of sound and light to a mutual aesthetic and emotional effect. In this book he explains his art in detail, complete with photographs of the Colour Organ, an explanation of the relationship between the musical scale and color, and a lengthy discussion of scientific/psychological theory related to colour and harmony.'Very briefly, my aim has been to deal with Colour in a new way, and to place its production under as easy and complete control as the production of sound in Music.Until now colour to a large extent in nature, and altogether in art, has been presented to us without mobility and almost invariably associated with form. Colour combined with form has constituted the whole colour art of the world. In painting colour has been used only as one of the elements in a picture, although perhaps the greatest source of beauty. We have not yet had pictures in which there is neither form nor subject, but only pure colour. Even the most advanced impressionism has not carried us thus far. In decorative art colour has, broadly speaking, held the same position. Moreover, to obtain particular tints of colour it has been necessary to mix them laboriously on the palette or in the dye-house. Art hitherto has not been able to compete in any sort of way with Nature in the mobility of her multitudinous and ever-varying combinations of colour. There has, in fact, been no pure colour art dealing with colour alone, and trusting solely to all the subtle and marvellous changes and combinations of which colour is capable as the means of its expression.