Aurbis 2: Colorful Boogaloo

I originally created the sketches for these posts in Paint.NET and annotated them by hand; as part of hosting them here, I have rebuilt the images in SVG and added some additional flair. The rainbow used for the color wheel is a model originally written by Mike Bostock.

Same soundtrack as the first one.

Introduction

In keeping with the spirit of writing esoteric extrapolations late at night, I present to you the sequel of Aurbis: The Musical concerning the Gods as Tones: the synæsthesia of Gods, Tones, and Colors. We know that the Magne-Ge are colors, and given that synæsthesia seems to be a profound mechanic of the universe (Tonal Architecture is the synæsthesia of Sound and Touch, for instance), I arrived at the conclusion that the Tones and Colors are merely two physical translations of the Gods.

Foundation

If you haven’t, reread Aurbis: The Musical and familiarize yourself with the musical listing of the gods.

Now, some other resources:

• Sonochromatism – the mapping of sound to color.

• I made this wheel to serve as a visual representation of the list of God-Tones from Aurbis 1. The longest, white spokes represent the Aedra; the middle, black, spokes are the Four Corners of the House of Troubles and the Three Good Daedra; the shortest, grey, spokes are the remaining Daedra.

  

Theory

Lorkhan, the Beat

Before I delve into the meat of this post, I want to quickly cover one thing. Look at the blank Wheel. See how the Aedric Tones are long, the 7 Prominent Daedra are middling, and the 10 Lesser Daedra are the shortest?

Circles are defined as a function of two variables: r (radius) and Θ (angle). The Gods are arrayed using Θ, but their status is determined by r. The Gods most associated with Lorkhan, the Aedra, have the highest r-values. The next level of Lorkhanic association (the Reclamations are strongly associated with him, and the House of Troubles are also tied into the kalpic nature of the world, but all are Daedra) are weaker, but still strong. Lastly, the ten remaining Daedra are associated with the tones with least commonality and power. As with my Music post yesterday, Lorkhan continues to be utterly different from, yet equally necessary, as the rest of the pantheon.

Color and Tone

I’ve taken the monochrome wheel and mapped the colors of human perception to it here. I elected to assign the primary colors of red, green, and blue to C♯, F, and A, respectively, and let the rest of the wheel fall into place from there. I will explain my rationale below. For additional symbolism, and as a reminder of the Anuad, I’ve added Anu and Padhome circling each other in the entanglement that created Aurbis.

Note that C♯, Red, happens to land on a Daedric Prince, whereas the other two primary colors are on Aedra (Kyne and Julianos). This may seem a little strange, considering that one of the tenets of my Musical Theory of Mundus is that the Aedra are the primaray Tones and the Daedra are less important harmonics. But look again at just who the pillar is: MALACATH. Malacath is formerly Trinimiac, an Aedra, who was changed (transposed, if you will) later on.

As an aside, the number 3 in TES is extremely significant in a few different overarching ways. One of these, the Triune House, is composed of two extremes and an intermediary. Trinimalacath is a primarily Elven deity, and Kyne is primarily human. Julianos, however, is revered by both Elves and Men and his sphere (magic and intellectualism) is relevant to both.

So. Let’s talk physics and theory (and also terror. blackens hands).

Human hearing ranges from ~20Hz to ~16kHz, and musical notes are spaced logarithmically (going up an octave doubles the frequency of each note). Human color perception ranges from 4×10¹⁴ to 8×10¹⁴, and unlike with music, which offers essentially limitless pure tones, there are only three pure colors we can see: red, green, and blue. (A small percentage of women have a genetic mutation granting them a fourth primary color, yellow). All other colors must exist as a harmonic chord of those three or four base colors.

As a result, while the repeating musical scale simply represents increases in frequency of single-tone notes, the rotating color wheel represents a field of three-color chords. The red-green (yellow family) and green-blue (cyan family) admixtures exist in nature as pure (single-frequency) waves, but the red-blue combinations (magenta family) do not.

Reality does not play nicely with mythology. The physics of the Aurbis need not map directly to our own in order for us to understand them; it is perfectly reasonable to posit that Aurbical mortals process light in the same way we process sounds, with a much greater spectrum of fundamental notes and greater possibilities of chords.

I want you to visualize a helix. It’s a screw: as a point rotates in a circle, the center moves along an orthogonal axis, creating a twist rather than a closed loop. If you look at it from the side, you see a sine wave, but if you look at it head-on, it makes a circle.

The Color and Tone wheels are, in fact, this helix. Each revolution is one octave. While we can perceive many turns of the Tone Helix, we only see one turn of the Color Helix. We can, however, assume that the Color Helix extends beyond our perception in the same manner as Tones do, and that the Gods are associated with their periodic Colors as they are with periodic Tones (the Octaves).

Synæsthesia

The mixture of “discrete” senses into single fields is one that features strongly in TES lore. Pure Song is perceived as all of the mortal senses, since this Song is what creates the world. Tonal Architecture reshapes the Song and sculpts matter. The Thu’um translates Voice into Color and Force. Color and Tone are intertwined in many regards and it is no stretch at all to unify them. Furthermore, the use of cross-sensory perception in the mythos of Mundus further illustrates the nature of the Dream state that Godhead, Anu, the Captive Sage, and perhaps more to come experience.

Summary

Not only can the world be described through Tone, but also Color. Furthermore, the two are intimately related and may be two aspects of the same fundamental concept.

(These are IRC logs from the #memospore channel, where several of us hung out to chat about esoterica in our free time. <MK> is Michael Kirkbride.)

Post-Script:

2013 Oct 18 00:26:34 <MK> Can you see the admixture of color and sound yet?

That line is pretty much why I wrote this.

Post-Post-Script:

2013 Oct 30 06:16:49 <MK> Dat thread about colors and sounds on reddit

2013 Oct 30 06:17:09 <!numinit> That was myrrlyn. Man

2013 Oct 30 06:18:07 <MK> mrlyyn did the lay up, that other dude slamdunked it doing airborned cartwheels

2013 Oct 30 06:18:19 <!numinit> this one? (link)

2013 Oct 30 06:18:25 <MK> y

2013 Oct 30 06:18:32 <!numinit> that was also myrrlyn

2013 Oct 30 06:18:47 <MK> I don’t even

Those lines are DEFINITELY why I wrote these.

Discography:

• Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor), track 15 on Sunshine: Music from the Major Motion Picture (2007), by John Murphy
• It Is Accomplished, track 20 on Passion (1989), by Peter Gabriel