{ "title": "Two men, one table, 1911", "notes": [ "C", "C#", "D", "D#", "E", "F", "F#", "G", "G#", "A", "A#", "B" ], "schemes": [ { "id": "scriabin", "who": "Alexander Scriabin", "year": 1911, "order": "circle-of-fifths", "confidence": "documented", "source": "Sabaneyev, 1911", "covers": 12, "by_fifths": [ [ "C", "Red" ], [ "G", "Orange-pink" ], [ "D", "Yellow" ], [ "A", "Green" ], [ "E", "Whitish-blue" ], [ "B", "Similar to E" ], [ "F#", "Blue, bright" ], [ "Db", "Violet" ], [ "Ab", "Purplish-violet" ], [ "Eb", "Steel colour with metallic sheen" ], [ "Bb", "Similar to E flat" ], [ "F", "Red, dark" ] ] }, { "id": "newton", "who": "Isaac Newton", "year": 1704, "order": "diatonic (Dorian, D to D)", "confidence": "documented", "source": "Opticks, 1704", "covers": 7, "note": "Seven colours, not twelve. The arcs of his colour circle are sized to the intervals of the Dorian scale, so the mapping is the proportions, not a list.", "sequence": [ "Red", "Orange", "Yellow", "Green", "Cyan", "Ultramarine", "Violet" ] }, { "id": "castel", "who": "Louis-Bertrand Castel", "year": 1734, "order": "chromatic", "confidence": "partial", "source": "Clavecin oculaire", "covers": 12, "note": "Took Newton's spectrum and interpolated twelve semitones. Only a fragment is in hand: B blue, C# celadon, D green. The rest needs a primary source before it can be drawn." }, { "id": "rimington", "who": "Alexander Wallace Rimington", "year": 1893, "order": "frequency ratio", "confidence": "method known, values not", "source": "A New Art: Colour-Music, 1893", "covers": 12, "note": "Equated the colour spectrum with the octave by matching frequency ratios. The method is documented; the resulting twelve values are not, here." }, { "id": "bishop", "who": "Bainbridge Bishop", "year": 1893, "confidence": "unverified", "covers": null, "note": "In the 2009 digitisation. No primary source checked." }, { "id": "helmholtz", "who": "Hermann von Helmholtz", "year": 1910, "confidence": "doubtful", "covers": null, "note": "In the 2009 digitisation as a twelve-colour scheme, but its hues are evenly spaced to within 20 degrees — the signature of a generated ramp rather than a record. Helmholtz worked on colour vision and on tone sensation; that he published a note-to-colour mapping needs establishing before it is drawn." } ], "the_2009_data": { "what": "Five twelve-colour arrays in the archived research page, one per theorist, as hex.", "status": "fails verification", "evidence": "Scriabin's array gives D orange, E amber, F green, G blue. Sabaneyev's table gives D yellow, E whitish-blue, F dark red, G orange-pink. It is not his scheme. Newton's array carries twelve entries where Opticks has seven, the last five being lightened variants of the first. Helmholtz's and Bishop's are near-even hue ramps.", "conclusion": "Not publishable as a record of what these people claimed. Usable only as what it is: one designer's 2009 rendering." }, "order": [ "C", "G", "D", "A", "E", "B", "F#", "Db", "Ab", "Eb", "Bb", "F" ], "order_note": "Circle of fifths, which is the order Sabaneyev printed both lists in. It is not an arrangement chosen here.", "tables": [ { "id": "scriabin", "who": "Alexander Scriabin", "kind": "constructed", "colours": { "C": "Red", "G": "Orange-pink", "D": "Yellow", "A": "Green", "E": "Whitish-blue", "B": "Similar to E", "F#": "Blue, bright", "Db": "Violet", "Ab": "Purplish-violet", "Eb": "Steel colour with metallic sheen", "Bb": "Similar to E flat", "F": "Red, dark" }, "admission": "“The three colors, which are clear to me, gave me three supports.” He derived the rest, in his own word, theoretically — juxtaposing allied colours arranged in a spectrum against allied tonalities arranged in the circle of fifths, and filling in the missing links." }, { "id": "rimsky", "who": "Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov", "kind": "reported", "colours": { "C": "White", "G": "Brownish-gold, light", "D": "Daylight, yellowish, royal", "A": "Clear, pink", "E": "Blue, sapphire, bright", "B": "Gloomy, dark blue with steel shine", "F#": "Greyish-green", "Db": "Darkish, warm", "Ab": "Greyish-violet", "Eb": "Dark, gloomy, grey-bluish", "Bb": "Darkish", "F": "Green, clear (colour of greenery)" } } ], "these_are_keys_not_notes": "Galeyev and Vanechkina are explicit: C, G, D here are tonalities, not notes. They note that researchers who are not musicians take them for note names and ascribe to Scriabin a version of colour hearing he never claimed. The 2009 digitisation made exactly that error, labelling them as a chromatic scale.", "sources": [ { "id": "galeyev", "title": "Galeyev & Vanechkina, “Was Scriabin a Synesthete?”", "url": "http://www.daysyn.com/Galeyev_and_Vanechkina_2001_-_Was_Scriabin_a_Synesthete.pdf", "retrieved": "2026-10-25", "note": "Leonardo, 2001. Carries both tables as Sabaneyev printed them, Scriabin's admission that he derived most of his, and the warning that these are keys rather than notes." } ], "what_this_is_not": "Not an attempt to settle which colour a key is. No such fact is on offer, and the two men who are supposed to be the authorities contradict each other in print. The subject is the association itself: that we form them, that they may be perceived or learned or built, and that they feel the same from the inside either way.", "limits": [ { "what": "Every colour here is a word, not a swatch.", "why": "Sabaneyev printed descriptions — “steel colour with metallic sheen”, “gloomy, dark blue with steel shine”. Turning those into hex is an interpretation, and doing it silently is how the 2009 version of this went wrong. Where a chip appears it is this page's reading, marked as derived, and the words stay next to it." }, { "what": "These are keys, not notes.", "why": "C, G, D here mean C major, G major, D major. Galeyev and Vanechkina note that readers who are not musicians take them for note names and credit Scriabin with a claim he never made." }, { "what": "Agreement is judged by this page, not by them.", "why": "Neither man ranked his certainty and neither compared himself to the other. Calling D a match and C a contradiction is a reading of two lists of adjectives, and someone else could read them differently." } ], "families": [], "page": { "title": "Two men, one table, 1911", "description": "Sabaneyev printed Scriabin's colour-key associations beside Rimsky-Korsakov's. Twelve keys, and they agree on two.", "poster_line": "Twelve keys, and they agree on two.", "body": ":standfirst\nBoth of them were certain. **They agree on two keys out of twelve.**\n\nIn 1911 the musicologist Sabaneyev published Scriabin's table of which colour\nbelonged to which key, and set Rimsky-Korsakov's beside it. Two composers,\nboth famous, both sure, both describing the same twelve keys. They match on D\nand E. On C, one says red and the other says white.\n\nThis is not an attempt to settle which colour a key is. There is no such fact\nwaiting to be found, and the page would be worse if it pretended otherwise.\n\nWhat is worth looking at is the association itself. We form them constantly —\nsome learned, some perceived, some built on purpose out of a theory — and\nfrom the inside they feel identical. A thing simply *is* that colour, or that\nshape, or that sound, and the certainty arrives before any reason for it\ndoes. That is not a defect in Scriabin or in Rimsky-Korsakov. It is the part\nof being a creature that makes any of this possible at all.\n\nThe useful question is not whether an association is real. It is whether it\nis load-bearing: whether it survives contact with other people well enough to\nbuild something on. Some do. [Every audio effect has a visual\ntwin](../cross-modal/) is six that did, and a working mixer made from two of\nthem. Pitch and colour is not among them — which is why that mixer uses\ncolour only to mark which channel you are dragging, and claims nothing by it.\nThis page is what the other end looks like.\n\n:label Who these two are\n\n:key **Scriabin said most of his were derived.** His own account: \"The three\ncolors, which are clear to me, gave me three supports.\" The rest he worked\nout — in his word, theoretically — by laying the spectrum against the circle\nof fifths and filling in the gaps.\n\n:key **Rimsky-Korsakov published his separately,** shortly before, and the two\ndisagreed heatedly about who was right.\n\n:key **These are keys, not notes.** C here means C major. Readers who are not\nmusicians have taken these for note names and credited Scriabin with a kind\nof colour hearing he never claimed.\n\n{{diagram}}\n\n:label Why they are in this order\n\nThe circle of fifths, because that is the order Sabaneyev printed them in,\nand because for Scriabin the order *is* the claim. Read chromatically his\nlist looks arbitrary. Read in fifths it is a spectrum, which is exactly what\nhe said he did to build it.\n\nRimsky-Korsakov's list does not resolve that way in either order. His white,\nhis darkish, his gloomy dark blue with steel shine — those are not positions\non a spectrum. They are what something looked like to him.\n\n:label What this cannot tell you\n\n{{limits}}\n\n:label Sources\n\n{{sources}}\n\n:footer Drawn October 2026 · The table is generated from [data.json](data.json), which carries both lists as Sabaneyev printed them" }, "generated_from": "content/note-colour/" }