Paintings Based on Relative Pitch in Music

Abstract

The author’s approach to painting changed direction in 1961 when she began formal studies of music. She adopted relative pitch as a measure for quantitatively differentiating musical tones represented in her paintings. Specifically, the pitch of a tone was designated in terms of the ratio of its frequency to that of middle C on a piano. She chose a scale with the aid of the Lambdoma diagram or Pythagorean table. The values of the resulting relative pitches and their reciprocals were appropriate for the representation of tones by radii or by areas in her paintings. In addition, for each musical tone she has assigned a specific color, a designation that she generally keeps constant. All the paintings of this series are of a geometrical character. She calls attention to two interesting results that have a relationship to musical tones in a circle of fifths. For example, her assigned colors in a circle of fifths appear as a sequence of complementary color pairs. The planets assigned by G. Arnoux to musical tones, when they are arranged in the order of ascending fifths, occur in a sequence corresponding to the positions of the planets from the Sun.