Comment by vitaly-pavlenko

Tldr no synesthesia (everyone is different), no "physical" idea, rather an attempt to do meaningful metaphors for I, IV, V chords and minor/major opposition.

My a bit outdated writeup: https://github.com/vpavlenko/rawl?tab=readme-ov-file#12-colo...

Also I wrote why I specifically don't want to use any psychological research on color-audio relations like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5835347/:

"in this article they try to find connections between the basic parameters of sound and colors at the level of existing unconscious sensations. in particular, the “pitch” parameter (height, note) - the only parameter that interests me - is very roughly scaled by them as higher pitch and darker pitch, with a spread of four octaves. my task is to find 12 colors in order to use all 12 within one octave, and to create from them a script in which the complex and variable structures of Western music are visible. i.e. they become visible if you look closely and compare

my task is not about the basic sensations of people from high or low notes. I simply show the height of the notes along the vertical axis: high notes at the top of the screen, low notes at the bottom. I need the color to: - show semantically the same note in different octaves in the same way (C of the first octave = C of the second octave) - make horizontal bundles of three or four colors (chords) catchy. There are only about 20 main chords (but there is also a long tail of rare ones)

Let me give you an analogy with natural language. Let’s say the Russian language doesn't have a script yet, and here we come linguist missionaries, and we are trying to create an optimal alphabet for the Russian people. Of course, research can be carried out about which letter is more similar to the vowel [a] or the vowel [u] in the Bouba/kiki sense. but the best alphabet is one that respects the statistical properties of vowel usage in that language. in particular, it correctly reflects that in this language there are only two vowel sounds (Abkhazian) or as many as twenty (Danish). if there are twenty of them, then we better have twenty contrasting letters (or not?)

and as a result, Georgian “u”, Hindi “u” and Arabic “u” are not similar to each other at all, and for some reason all three writing systems work perfectly

I have two main requirements for my system: - so that the most frequency structures from the Western musical tradition are striking (I did this as much as possible) - so that 12 colors are the most contrasting, incl. for people with different forms of vision color deficiency"