0000000000801297
AUTHOR
Giovanni Santini
Color and Timbre Gestures: An Approach with Bicategories and Bigroupoids
White light can be decomposed into different colors, and a complex sound wave can be decomposed into its partials. While the physics behind transverse and longitudinal waves is quite different and several theories have been developed to investigate the complexity of colors and timbres, we can try to model their structural similarities through the language of categories. Then, we consider color mixing and color transition in painting, comparing them with timbre superposition and timbre morphing in orchestration and computer music in light of bicategories and bigroupoids. Colors and timbres can be a probe to investigate some relevant aspects of visual and auditory perception jointly with thei…
Classes of Colors and Timbres: A Clustering Approach
Similarities between different sensory dimensions can be addressed considering common “movements” as causes, and emotional responses as effects. An imaginary movement toward the “dark” produces “dark sounds” and “dark colors,” or, toward the “bright,” “brighter colors” and “brighter sounds.” Following this line of research, we draw upon the confluence of mathematics and cognition, extending to colors and timbres the gestural similarity conjecture, a development of the mathematical theory of musical gestures. Visual “gestures” are seen here as paths in the space of colors, compared with paths in the space of orchestral timbres. We present an approach based on clustering algorithm to evaluate…