All the notes of the rainbow

DALL·E simply refuses to make a 12-note Chromaspiel.

I’ve started a gallery of musical toys because, well, I’m really into musical toys.

Can you blame me? Each toy is a little world you can step into and play around in, and imagine things about music in, and think things about music in, and feel things about music in. It’s kind of like having an experience of… music.

Now some toys are more or less explicitly “educational” toys. They’re trying to teach you something, to develop some skill. But all toys teach in a way, don’t they? They make suggestions, perhaps not knowing quite what you’ll do with those suggestions, but they set up possibilities. They’re baked into the design of the toy. Maybe a toy will vaguely be trying to promote the development of fine motor skills. Or maybe it’s trying to expose you to the basics of music notation in some way. Or to the sounds of different instruments or animals. Or maybe it’s trying to place you in an imagination space that gives you some taste of the “real thing.”

A toy communicates in a very subtle and powerful way. It lets you discover something, it creates a perception or sensitivity to the world that you might not have noticed without that toy. Or else it takes an intuition you already have and gives it a form. Like how playing a guitar can feel like howling at the moon.

Now to some extent all this comes about by design. And that’s what I want to get into a little here. Some design choices are pure genius, and the result is a feeling of unbridled joy and surprise and a desire to play with the thing and never put it down. Other design choices are perhaps less conscious. They’re inherited from the norms, like, for example, how a keyboard is laid out, or where it starts or stops. Of course, those kinds of inherited norms don’t prevent anyone from turning the black keys into drum sticks, or turning the whole keyboard into a grinning cat.

But then there are some design choices that don't feel like choices at all, that feel like missed opportunities. They look right past connections that could bring our attention to whole domains of music we might otherwise be playing with, exploring, and noticing things through. The one I’d like to take up here—the one I’ve noticed most often across countless toys—involves the pairing of colors with musical notes.

Let me characterize how this often works: We want toys to be colorful, because colors are fun and engaging and evoke playfulness and childhood and sensory development and all kinds of good things. And music toys very often include some kind of musical notes. As it happens, there are just as many colors of the rainbow (ROYGBIV) as there are notes in the musical scale (CDEFGAB), so we put two and two together, and get a musical rainbow.

A stock glockenspiel (Stockenspiel?) from Alibaba

Now that you know what to look for, you’ll start to see this musical rainbow all over the toy gallery. Except it’s not quite this simple. For one thing, lots of toys seem to have more than seven notes. What do we do with those?

p.s. what’s that one white note about?

And other toys decide to start the rainbow on an entirely different note. And reverse the order of the colors? And replace indigo with white?

Maybe they just ran out of indigo paint.

Others map the rainbow onto collections of notes other than a scale.

“D, G, D, G, D” (sort of)

And still others reject this scheme entirely because rainbow colors are so childish and what we really want to cultivate is sensitivity to a sophisticated, neutral color palette. Or at least that’s what we’d prefer to have laying around the house.

It is pretty, tbh.

Now, color has a superpower. It’s a way of naming something without using names—it can create a pre-verbal category. Toys do something similar when they embed a musical keyboard, because the very layout of the keyboard is a way of “naming” the musical notes. But colors are even more flexible than a keyboard. Most simply, different colors can convey pure difference. And similar colors convey sameness. Rainbow colors can convey order. And using color consistently can reinforce a certain idea or perception, even across many different toys.

A toy designer once told me that the standard rainbow note mapping is patented as part of the Orff Schulwerk method, “Orff colors,” and that toy and instrument makers need to find subtle ways to design around that patent. I have not yet been able to find any evidence to corroborate that story, and although this would certainly contribute to a rampant inconsistency of note colors across toys, it’s hard to believe that such a thing would be patentable.

The Chroma-Notes system used in the Boomwhackers® line of instruments (and loosely based on the Orff Method) does claim on their website to be patented, although the only patent I can dig up by its inventor doesn’t mention color. In any case, their approach does something truly unique: it translates the physical distinctiveness of the keyboard into a distinctive rainbow of colors.

Chroma-Notes™ Resonator Bells

It accomplishes this by stretching the musical rainbow across a full 12-note chromatic (which literally means "colored") scale. And what’s coolest, it goes about this systematically, dividing the color spectrum in much the same way equal tempered tuning divides the pitch spectrum. Three primary colors expand to six, and six to twelve, ensuring each evenly spaced note in pitch space corresponds to an evenly spaced color in color space. As a bonus, each color gets its own distinctive name: Red-Orange becomes "Vermillion," Orange-Yellow becomes "Saffron." This system has all the makings of a note-color standard—provided you remember to pay your licensing fees.

But hold on, I slipped up in that last paragraph. It’s not quite the pitch spectrum that’s being evenly divided and matched up with color here. It’s really just the idea of a spectrum. Seeing the rainbow stretched across the keyboard has actually unsettled the very notion of what we assume a musical “note” is.

Believe it or not, notes weren’t “officially” connected to specific pitches until 1936 (yes, you read that right) when the International Standards Organization published ISO 16, setting the note “A” to 440 cycles per second. Before that, “A” drifted all over the pitch spectrum—sometimes inflating as regional orchestras tried to sound "brighter" than their neighbors—and it still drifts, although now it drifts around an idealized point.

And before that, an idealized point is all a note was—not connected to pitch at all, or to anything audible, for that matter. A note existed in pure geometric space, the result of a ratio, a relationship to other idealized points. At one point when I had way too much time on my hands, I drew this little diagram of how Euclid derives all the musical notes using ratios in his Division of a Monochord.

The big letters are points in Euclid’s propositions, and the little letters in parentheses are the modern note names.

What matters about this diagram is that it looks more like a transit map than a traditional spectrum or color wheel. The idea of a spectrum of notes is, in itself, quite an innovation. And although equal tempered tuning has transformed our conception of notes into evenly spaced points along this spectrum, its notes still remain relationships between idealized points. This concept is so deeply embedded in our culture that it forms the developmental basis for how we learn to listen to music.

But the moment we allow our idealized spectrum of notes to meet an audible spectrum of pitch, we get an even more significant transformation of what a “note” is. At first, each successive note seems like a point along the pitch spectrum. But really, each note behaves more like a category—a little bucket that collects a certain range of pitch until it overflows into the next bucket. Color names work this way, too. A whole range of visible colors gets collected into the buckets we call “red” or “blue.”

Here’s where things start to get fun. By no longer thinking of notes as idealized points, we’ve also loosened our grip on the ideal of… an ideal. Suddenly, what it means to be “correct” becomes a little fuzzier. We can be a little messier, a little more playful. And if anything invites us to be a little messier and more playful, well, it’s toys.

Which is good, because we still have a couple design problems on the table. For one, we haven’t quite figured out how to match colors with notes, short of borrowing the Orff convention of starting “Red” on “C.” And beyond that, there’s the bigger question of what the colors are doing there in the first place. What I’d really love is to find a way for the presence of a color to draw us even more deeply into the experience of a note. And now that a note has become a messy container for pitch, there’s an opening—if you’re willing to follow me into a pretty playful imagination space.

About a decade ago, when the Web Audio API became a thing, Chrome Music Labs came out with some very cute little oscillator characters—delightful enough to make their way into a conversation about toys. Tap this little square fellow to see what he has to say.

The oscillator.frequency.value represents cycles per second. So if you go all the way down to 1, you’ll get the ticking of a clock. 12-20 takes you into motorcycle engine territory. And anywhere above that, you’re in the realm of musical pitch.

What if we imagine that everything—really, everything—exists somewhere on this same spectrum? The lower limit, if there is one, might be the Big Bang—it’s still working through its first cycle. An earthquake might quake somewhere between a fraction of a cycle per second and 100 cycles per second. And then the ISO standard for the note “A” is set at exactly 440 cycles per second.

We humans have a strange quality in our perception of pitch: we hear doublings of a frequency as versions—maybe tints—of the same note. So 440, 880, and 1760 cycles per second all sound like versions of the note “A.” Once we pass about 20,000 cycles per second, we’re beyond the upper limit of what we perceive as pitch. Beyond that, we enter ultrasound, then radio waves, microwaves, infrared, and finally—after about 40 doublings of our original “A”—we reach the visible light spectrum.

That frequency is 4.84E+14 cycles per second, which falls into an imperfect container we call—who’d’a guessed it?—“Orange.”

Now, unlike the pitch spectrum, we don’t perceive the color spectrum as repeating when its frequencies are doubled. So once we’ve reached the color “violet,” we just continue on into the ultraviolet spectrum, then into X-rays, gamma rays, and who knows, maybe some uniquely perceptive folks out there will find human emotions, or the subconscious, or the numinous somewhere on this spectrum, too.

This has given me a whole new appreciation for the color “magenta,” which exists between violet and an imaginary return to red. But there’s another problem. Even if the color spectrum did return to red, it would do so after spanning only ten musical notes, not the full twelve of the chromatic scale (sorry, saffron). So you’d pretty much need to be a bee or a butterfly to see the ultraviolet colors of those remaining two notes. And of course these two perceptions—color and pitch—don’t align neatly the way we so badly wish they would. Systems we attempt to build out of the perceptible world never quite do.

Ugh. So close.

But luckily, if we can invent “magenta,” we can also invent “pink,” and then not only have we neatly closed the loop, but we’ve also paid homage to the wonderful messiness of human perception.

Give these twelve colors twelve names—especially names that are relatively child-friendly—and they’re free to contain any visible variation of their color that we like. Even a muted, sophisticated version that will look great on your living room floor.

“Red, Scarlet, Orange, Yellow, Lime, Green, Turquoise, Blue, Indigo, Purple, Magenta, and Pink.”

Notes made visible, color made audible. And who knows, if you listen closely, maybe you'll be able to hear the formation of a planet, or an earthquake, or even a feeling.

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