Chromatic

Chromatic is an experimental piece about a pun that turns out to be load-bearing. Chromatic names both the twelve-tone scale that Western music divides the octave into, and colour itself. The work takes that coincidence literally: twelve pitches, twelve hues, one continuous wheel.

An original composition was converted to MIDI, and each note event mapped to an RGB value. That colour sequence was then played back through a light source in real time and recorded by a camera held open at high exposure — so the performance did not produce a video of itself, but a single still frame in which the entire piece is present at once.

Concept

Music is an art form made of time. You cannot see a song; you can only be inside it while it passes, and it exists only in the order and duration of its parts. A photograph or a canvas is the opposite — an art form made of space, entirely present the moment you look at it, holding no sequence of its own.

Chromatic lays one onto the other. The long exposure is the operation that performs the translation: over the seconds the shutter stays open, the light traces its path, and each instant of the music is deposited somewhere in the frame. Time becomes extent. What was a sequence you had to wait through becomes a shape you can take in all at once — the whole composition legible in a glance, its structure visible as colour and gesture rather than heard as duration.

The result is not an illustration of the song. It is the same information in a medium that has different rules about what it means to happen.

Process

• An original composition, written first as music
• Converted to MIDI, reducing the performance to discrete pitch and timing events
• Each of the twelve pitch classes assigned a hue, and note events resolved to RGB
• The colour sequence driven through a light source, played back in the score's own tempo
• A single high-exposure frame capturing the full sequence as a light painting

Credits

• Composition, MIDI-to-Colour Mapping & Software: Aaron Wong-Ellis
• Collaborating Artist: Kevin Meric — industrial designer, artist and photographer (Portfolio · Instagram)

Gallery