TLDR: Imaginary Colour was inspired by a dear musician friend who asked me if I had ever considered writing impressionist music using different equal divisions of the octave (EDO).
PROMPT: Microtonal Impressionism in the style of Debussy and Satie
It was Summer 2020, I’ve just released New Color Bomb (breakdown coming soon) and I’m looking for something new and different to sink my teeth into. My microtonal friend, Jeff Brown asked me if I had ever considered writing microtonal impressionist music, and I hadn’t.. so the next time I went to my studio I started messing around with this new sample library I’d been testing and Pleirogloss just came out that afternoon.
I gathered a few more and collected them, named them all after imaginary colours I found in literature and that was that.
The video I made using GanBreeder (ArtBreeder) was one of the very first AI music videos ever made.
1. Pleirogloss - “the color of when a soldier comes home from war and sees his dog for the first time” is the favorite color of Michael from the television show The Good Place.
Written in 19EDO you would be forgiven in thinking it was regular diatonic music except the thirds are slightly sweeter and the minor slightly darker. At 39s the first clue that this isn’t Kansas anymore and the whole harmony drops 1/19 (a Ninitone™) to finally give the game away then it’s just sailing to the end.
2. Sangoire - is described as ‘the color of blood spilled in moonlight’, from Kushiel's Legacy Series by Jacqueline Carey.
The tuning is 16EDO which is made from 16 three-quarter-tones (75c) and preserves the Minor, Diminished fifth, Major 6 and octave. Everything else is sour and lets you get really SAAAD.
3. Dolm is the colour you get when you mix blue with the other Imaginary colour, Ulfire which is only visible on the planet Arcturus from A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay. It is written in 22EDO which is the most uncanny of all musical valleys. Chord changes are slightly wonky but more in tune in places. I find 22 to be incredibly relaxing even when the chords are yearning to resolve.
4 Cosmogone is golden yellow and heavily associated with dreams in in the subterranean Neath of Failbetter Games' Fallen London universe.
Its written using 31 notes per octave which is one of the most consonant tunings ever discovered. Thirds are much closer to Just Intonation (JI) than 12EDO and fifths are almost perfect too. Again most of it is diatonic, and I try to use the micro chord shifts for extra colour especially in the last minute
5. Stygian Blue - This is an “impossible colour” one of those which you only see with your mind.. It is the opposite colour space as yellow, so when you stare at yellow and then switch to staring at black. The after-image is Stygian Blue, simultaneously dark and bright…. just like the music in 18EDO this is a more jazzy affair, less impressionist and with lots of microchromatic counterpoint - that is - moving up or down by 1 step in whatever tuning system, letting you really hear the EDO-ness of it. I think all tuning systems deserve some microchromatic motion though. Rimsky-Korsakov would have had a field day had he had an 18EDO synth!
6. HooVooLoo is an ultra-intelligent shade of blue in The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. During Zaphod's theft of the Heart of Gold, it's seen in a prism, reading a book.
It’s written in 15EDO and we’re definitely out of impressionism. By now I was having so much fun with the felt piano library that I went off piste and this draws from the schmaltzy cheek-to-cheek dance music of the 1930s only this time with 3 extra notes to squeeze in. That lets you get an extra note or two when moving up a normally small interval. Jacob Collier demonstrates this well here, when he sings a minor third split into more than 3 notes.
7. Squant - a fourth primary color invented by the Avant-garde band Negativland in 1993. This sounds nothing like Negativland but I just liked the word and the idea of the colour.
A rag-time in 19EDO and my love letter to one of the first composers I remember being obsessed by as a kid, Scott Joplin.
At the end are a couple of remixes I made because I can’t just leave things alone… and not too much more to add but I hope you enjoyed. Leave a comment, drop a link. Be nice.
* No pianos were harmed in the making of this movie, I used Kontakt and The Emperor and King pianos by Chris at pianobook.co.uk
** If you want a copy of the score (Transcribed by Stephen Weigel in microtonal and scordatura notation), send me a message and I’ll get you all set up.