Main content

The Colours in Sound, with Caroline Shaw

Grammy-award winning composer Caroline Shaw takes us on a journey through the colours in sound.

Grammy-award winning composer Caroline Shaw takes us on a journey through the colours in sound. She explores how composers use their paint brushes to draw light to hidden qualities within tones.

Sounds have been described as having colours since the very first writings on music. And many composers have played with the idea - or even their own lived experience of - synaesthesia: the perception of sound combinations as having chromatic, visual qualities.

In this three part series, Caroline Shaw explores how composers have used humanity's seemingly universal urge to directly and metaphorically associate sound with colour in their compositions to vivid emotional and musical effect: literally "rendering" the tones, melodies and harmonies of their compositions in specific shades, but also in ways that evoke more general arrays of sparkling and twinkling; velvety mellifluence, and piercing shards of clarity, experiences that would be described in more modern times as "Klangfarbenmelodien" - tone colour melodies.

Available now

There are currently no available episodes

Coming Up

No upcoming broadcasts