Italian artist Francesca Fini shows her interpretation of the sound of colors

ATLANTA - Jan. 19, 2014 - PRLog -- The Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is an annual event to find the worldʼs best new ideas in musical instrument design, engineering, and performance, is held at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Sponsored by the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, the School of Music, and the College of Architecture, the competition selects 20-25 semi-finalists from all over the world each year to come to Georgia Tech to compete.

BLIND, by Italian artist Francesca Fini is a performance experiment blending together body-art and interaction design. As a synaesthetic person the artist can “hear” and “feel” colors and the purpose of the performance is to transport the audience in an immersive dimension in which the performer becomes the mediator of an experience of color through interactive sound.

During the performance Francesca Fini uses different colored paints in front of a webcam that is programmed to recognize four main colors; blue, red, green and yellow. The information produced is then processed by an interaction design software and sent to a digital synthesizer that associates a special sound to each color. The harmonic flow and modulation of each sound, or combination of sounds, is determined by the data produced by the coordinates of the color blobs in space, so that the artist's painted hands, tracked by the webcam, become a sort of musical instrument.

The scientific research on the deep relationship between sound and color is the starting point of a personal journey in which the artist discovers the infinite connection between the senses.

Francesca Fini: "In BLIND I want to tell the spirit of each of the four main colors that I use, through a sound or a combination of sounds. In order to be effective I associated to each color a group of instruments with a well-defined personality; I choose a mix of strings for the squeaky, creative, energetic, querulous yellow. I selected an electric guitar for the wise, modern, cool and powerful blue. And then the piano for the passionate, bloody, sweet and round red. I choose some noisy electronic “humming” sounds for the acid, angry and edgy green (imagine a swarm of prickly insects hiding in a dark green forest). As you can imagine the scientific and very precise research about color and blindness is just the beginning of my free and poetical elaboration; in fact I choose the instruments starting from my own personal experience and imagination of colors. The scientific and very precise research is just the beginning of my free and poetical elaboration; in fact I choose the

instruments starting from my own personal experience and imagination of colors. During the whole performance I try to “interpret” the spirit of color, not only with the sounds I chose, their modulation and pitches, but also with the quality of the movement of my body on stage. Once a probably not very cleaver art critic asked me: what is the meaning of this? Well, there is no meaning. I just want you to smell the yellow, to hear its music, to keep it between the fingers."

Video of the performance: https://vimeo.com/26297848