In tracking the timbre changes produced by the human voice I went back to the system I created with vowel sounds for my work on Kurt Schwitters Ursonate. This system was a transformation of the Bruckner system which showed harmonic movement and quality. First I divided the sixteen vowel sounds in German into rounded and unrounded groups. The rounded values were assigned to the list of colors from the cool side of a twelve step color wheel, with unrounded coming from a warm list of colors. As the tongue moves down in the mouth when pronouncing different vowels, the colors would be moving from warmer to cooler/ lighter to darker and would come from the appropriate list. The front/back location in the mouth for the production of a vowel determines what percentage of complimentary color is added to the final color mixture. For Quanta and Hymn to Matter I extended the chart to include English vowels which are not present in the German list. |