colour music

colour music, music intended for instrumental performance in conjunction with a simultaneous projection of changing colours onto a screen. It has its origins in the theory, prevalent in the Renaissance and systematically set forth by the 17th-century Jesuit music theorist and mathematician Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), that each musical sound has a necessary, objective correspondence to a certain colour. From the 18th to the 20th century, experiments were made by adapting various keyboard instruments in such...