MUSICAL COLORS is an educational company which has been founded for the primary purpose of providing a detailed and comprehensive approach to the study of music theory, music composition and musical instrument appreciation through the simultaneous and complimentary application of the two ancient languages of MUSIC and COLOR.
MUSIC and COLOR have been around since the "Dawn of Man" and we have always felt a direct connection between these two artistic languages. This unique conjoined perception is known as Synesthesia. Since these ancient times, science has sought to relate these two languages through one unified language, which would bring the two disciplines together into a cohesive natural law, governing the order of the relation between both.
As long as MUSIC has been around, musicians have worked to simplify the notation of music as well as to develop efficient and concise methods for teaching music theory through the use of COLOR. As fantastic as these methods were and currently are, the attempts by scientists, musicians and artists alike have been numerous throughout the centuries. In essence, it would seem that we are all part of a vast and diverse MUSICAL COLORS family.
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So who is the main individual behind our efforts?
Michael John Wiley
MUSICAL COLORS Chief Developer & Company President
Michael is an accomplished composer and musician with over 20 years experience in the field of music and musicology. In 2002, he was awarded third prize in the prestigious Toru Takemitsu Orchestral Competition (held every year in Tokyo, Japan), for his ground breaking work, Tzolkin in C Major. The work was based on his research into the nature of the scientific and mathematical relationships between the Overtone Series, a naturally occurring phenomenon in acoustics, and the world famous Mayan Tzolkin 260 Day Calendar, a natural timing frequency matrix that synchronizes the elements of nature with the fabric of time itself.
Hello and welcome to our website. My name is Michael and I would like to share a little of my own musical journey with you. When I was enrolled at the University of Arizona Music College in 1991, I ran into serious problems of practical realization on my primary instrument, the classical guitar. I quickly came to realize that it would be easier for me to learn to play music on my guitar if there could be some kind of visual reference that showed me clearly where all musical notes fell on the fret board of my instrument. So naturally, that is what I did and everyone around me, including my teachers, were amazed at how my musicianship had improved.
During that same year, after putting colored stickers on my guitar, I did some extensive research and found out that this idea was really nothing new. But it did not matter, the knowledge was still incredibly useful at helping me know what notes I was playing while composing, improving my improvisational skills with other musicians and simply just playing sheet music. During this time, I publicly displayed my color coded guitar a great deal throughout the four years I was enrolled in Music College. Since then, the system I had developed has evolved into a wonderfully artistic and theoretical approach to music.
There have been many other methods and tools that have sought to do the same thing. Some have been cumbersome and others have been quite ingenious. The important thing to realize is that it does not really matter what kind of system one uses to mark notes on an instrument, be it with color or symbols or a combination of both in any type of configuration; it's more than likely been done before. And at the end of the day, it is all just memorization and practice anyway. The real value in the system that I have developed resides not only in the many benefits of older color coding systems, but also because I had written an interactive and comprehensive music theory reference manual.
Years of study in music theory went into the production of this manual (my graduate research). The manual is, of coarse, linked with an intuitive yet arbitrary color coding system that makes it possible to transmit information in the manual into actually realizing it on an instrument as music. The information is really nothing new, but it's displayed in a simple, logical and elegant manner that contains color coded music theory in the form of all known musical scales and chords in any given musical key; which reference one another. These theoretical connections and relationships are what gives music its ability to move and flow in an artistic manner.
This manual is curently taking on an accelerated form with our music theory manual interface software which is being created with the specific intent to make musical navigation in the manual second nature. These resources, combined with a professionally designed set of custom color coded stickers, and the fact that the system is cross cultural and multi-aged, is the real power behind MUSICAL COLORS. It's something that we truly believe distinguishes our products from other similar products on the market today.
However, there is only one way to be sure.
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