Jake Lesher: Autumn Leaves

Autumn Leaves: translating a jazz standard to the visual medium

by Jake Lesher

It was like a bridge between sound and color. When Thomas Young conducted his now famous double slit experiment in 1801, he observed that light passing through two parallel apertures did not yield two bright spots, as is expected of a particle, but rather, as Young describes them, “undulations”1, which marked the first recorded observation of light’s wavelike properties. Young would go on to measure the specific wavelengths and frequencies of different colors of light.

Sound waves share many characteristics with light waves, even if they do not share the same sensory organ. For example, many musical metaphors reference sight, or more broadly, spatial perception as a whole. The most extreme form of this association between music and light occurs in individuals with sound-color synesthesia. However, these metaphors are ubiquitous among not only individuals, but entire cultures: “high” and “low” notes, “bright” and “dark” tones, “thick” and “thin” melodies.

We can apply these vibrational metaphors to our physiology as well; as Céline Frigau Manning put it, the relationship between tuning strings on a musical instrument and nerve tension in the body transcends the figurative and becomes a literal way of understanding the body.2 Movement produces nervous vibrations in the body independent of auditory or visual perception, further suggesting that vibrations of one modality are not tied to their medium, and have the potential to be translated to another.

Because they are shared by both music and color, the quantifiable elements of wavelength and frequency — when coupled with linguistic metaphors that bridge sound and color — allows for an atypical representation of music in the visual realm. By translating a popular jazz composition to the visual realm and beyond black and white sheet music, I will highlight abstract elements of music theory in a more readily apparent and comprehensive way.

NOTES

  1. Thomas Young, (November 12, 1801), royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1802.0004, 16.
  2. Frigau Manning, Céline, Tillmann Taape, and Lan Li. Hypnosis & Musical States of Mind. Other, n.d., 14:17.

Captions

To capture elements of music to be portrayed in a visual medium, I began with synesthetic associations between musical notes and color. Although musicians with grapheme-color synesthesia may associate particular colors with notes on a page (e.g. the note “A” might be red), but this sensation is merely an association between colors and the concept of letters, not the notes themselves. I decided to take this association one step further and assign each note on the twelve-note chromatic scale a particular color, corresponding to its position of its eponymous key on the circle of fifths. The closer two keys are to each other on this circle, the more notes they have in common, which I extended into my color assignments. For example, D is followed by A is followed by E on the circle, and these three notes correspond to orange, red, and magenta, respectively. I extended this color correspondence beyond notes, and also applied it to the chord progression, key, and repeated motifs of “Autumn Leaves”.

This composition represents the basic structure of “Autumn Leaves”, and could be understood as a metaphorical “pallet” for other interpretations of the song. The repetition of basic rhythmic structures leaves a lot of room to create alternative renditions of the song. This is because most contemporary transcriptions of jazz standards like “Autumn Leaves” prioritize chord progressions and improvisation over specific, complex rhythms. Artists are meant to begin with the basic idea and feeling of a composition and apply their own ideas and style, allowing for nearly infinite iteration on a common theme, much like a pallet of different paints allows for infinite expression when applied to canvas. The position of different colors on this composition is merely a loose suggestion of where those colors could be used in the finished product.
The first two phrases of “Autumn Leaves” are almost entirely identical, which is indicated by the repetition of the same shapes and motifs in the first four lines of my translation. However, the second phrase is often played one octave higher, which I portrayed using lighter versions of the same colors, in accordance with the strong association between high/low pitches and bright/dark colors among both synesthetes and the general population.

 

One of my personal favorites, Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley’s take on “Autumn Leaves” evokes a very different impression than the original. Miles Davis utilizes the more laid-back tempo very effectively, separating notes with staccato tonguing and leaving long rests in between musical ideas to heighten their impact, especially at the beginning of the song. Another liberty Davis takes with the original piece is his use of shorter notes to move between longer tones. For example, in measure twelve, we see that Davis begins on a relatively dissonant B during a C major chord, which is echoed in the odd color combination of fuchsia and chartreuse, respectively. We then observe a quick move through various notes with different harmonic relationships to the color of the original chord, before he resolves to a more pleasant color combination (red on purple) and a more euphonious harmony (A over an F# minor chord, creating a major third interval).

 

 

References

Chet Baker. Autumn Leaves. She Was Too Good To Me. Van Gelder Studio, NJ: Creed Taylor, 1974. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgn7VfXH2GY.

Frigau Manning, Céline, Tillmann Taape, and Lan Li. Hypnosis & Musical States of Mind. Other, n.d. https://cargocollective.com/mind-metaphors/STATES-OF-MIND

Miles Davis Sextet. Autumn Leaves. Somethin’ Else. Blue Note Records, NJ: Alfred Lion, 1958. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u37RF5xKNq8.

Shayan, Shakila, Ozge Ozturk, and Mark A. Sicoli. “The Thickness of Pitch: Crossmodal Metaphors in Farsi, Turkish, and Zapotec.” The Senses and Society 6, no. 1 (2011): 96–105. https://doi.org/10.2752/174589311×12893982233911.

Ward, J, B Huckstep, and E Tsakanikos. “Sound-Colour Synaesthesia: to What Extent Does It Use Cross-Modal Mechanisms Common to Us All?” Cortex 42, no. 2 (2006): 264–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0010-9452(08)70352-6.

Young, Thomas. “On the Theory of Light and Colours.” The Bakerian Lecture. Lecture, November 12, 1801. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1802.0004.

 

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