More than anyone else it was the Russian composer Scriabin who was interested in the psychological effects of the simultaneous experience of color and sound. In comparison to contemporary investigation of tone-color correspondences by experimental psychologists – which will be discussed later – Scriabin started at a more complex level of synesthetic experiences. He started from a system of color-key correspondences instead of color-tone correspondences. He investigated the emotional aspects of synesthetic experiences of color during the change of one musical key to another….. Current artistic experimentation seems mostly involved with digital devices and a search for algorythms to translate music into images (e.g. visual music, animation). The present situation in artistic synesthesia research may be compared to the late nineteenth-century period of experimentation with color-organ technology. Source: Experiments With Synesthesia
“In 1909, Kandinsky wrote the mysterious text of his proposed music-drama The Yellow Sound (the composer was supposed to be Thomas de Hartmann, who later worked with the “mystic” Gurdjieff). The fifth scene begins: “The stage is gradually saturated with a cold, red light, which slowly grows stronger and equally slowly turns yellow. The giants become visible as do the rocks.” Source: The Guardian, Sound & Vision
“Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with ‘reality,’ next to the ‘real’ world. Deeper down, it is subject to the common laws of the ‘cosmic world.’ And so a ‘new world of art’ is juxtaposed to the ‘world of nature.’ This ‘world of art’ is just as real, just as concrete. For this reason I prefer to call so-called ‘abstract’ art ‘concrete’ art.â€
— Wassily Kandinsky