Comment by SuperPaintMan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SuperPaintMan | Hacker News Reader

This pops up in abstracted painting as well, colours (more specfically the feelings/emotions we ascribe to a particular combunations) are entirely created due our cultural context. The greatest example of this is the colour of death, Black for western contries, White for eastern.

Western fine art is more formulaic in it's creation, due to training using colour wheels (complementary across, traidic and other geometric harmonies) and a analytic notion of these harmonies.Even the pleasing ratios of area are codified (5:1 Yellow:Purple for weight balence) Itten wrote quite a few books on balence/design and became a major influence on modern art. Contrast this with naieve/primal forms created by those without that training.

One size fits all does not work for the arts. It cant be a product that is objectively correct.

Now if someone played a diasonant frequency and time the beat such that it fell in line with the tempo of a composition. That would be a cool way to add structure to a work. No idea on how to do the math here, but how many cent under standard tuning would generate this for an andante tempo?

Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death? To me, it has always represented either nothingness, like the void of Space, or opting out of an aesthetic choice - I don't know what color car I want to drive, so I'll just get a black one.

Try this: what color is death to you?

Ghosts are usually white.

That's because they started picturing them back in the day as wearing the same white linen thing (shroud) they used to wrap dead bodies in before burying them.

In occident there is a general consensus that black is the normal color for death, but in some parts of Asia death is represented by white. This is the reason of karategi being white for example.

Most martial arts uniforms are white. Due to this, it could be said that white is the color of learning to fight.

Are white in japanese martial arts, for the same reason, but white is not so present in Indonesian schools of martial arts for example. It was supposed to intimidate the oponent. But the context was lost in occident. White were also much easier to clean, so was readily adopted and a practical choice indoors. In real war is not so practical, white gets dust and turns quickly to kaki, other historical uniforms were scarlet red with the purpose of hiding the blood (and vital info about the damage done to his carrier). With fire weapons, all those bright colors turned out to make easier targets and all armies learn quickly to addopt camo.

Death is a change of state. When a car runs out of gas, what color is that situation? What is the color of an arriving email? The concept doesn't apply well.

Red, Green respectively.

With a big enough sample we might be able to draw some conclusions.

Man who runs a funeral business books his hearse in to have the paintwork redone. What colour is it?

Woman gets dressed to go to a funeral. What colour dress does she pick out?

In large parts of the west, these questions have one answer.

Yet "black tie event" does not imply death, instead it implies a fancy party. In auto racing, a black flag is a penalty, but it's not fatal. The American Express Black card is a symbol of vast wealth, not mortality.

Your statement does not contradict the former - black represents death but death does not necessarily represent black.

It's not that black implies death. Rather: what color goes well with death? In the west that color is black.

>Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death?

How is it any different "near Seattle"? All over the US and Europe people have been using black to signify death for centuries. From the usual depiction of death as a black robe wearing skeleton with a skythe, to the black color of hearses, to the black clothing traditionally associated with funerals and mourning, down to black clothes worn by Death Metal and Goth fans.

I actually think the hearse and funeral/mourning clothes count as opting out of aesthetic choice - minimizing the self by foregoing self-expression

Have you seen what funeral directors wear? Sometimes it's like a panto costume, with weird ribboned hats and waistcoats and tails and just a mishmash of different stuff.

A difference of x Hz produces a beat at 30x BPM. So notes at 440Hz and 443Hz (a difference of 11.8 cents) would produce a 90BPM tempo. But at higher frequencies the same increase in Hz corresponds to a smaller number of cents: 4400Hz to 4403Hz would be 1.18 cents.

Darn, So to match an exact tempo using beats limits to one singular note.

You're conflating colour symbolism with colour harmonies. They are two completely different phenomena.

I don't know any visual artist who would claim that colour harmonies from the art of another culture are incomprehensible/jarring. Actually I would expect to get the opposite answer.

Popular colour combos for interior decoration, though, are naturally going to vary culturally, but (I claim) within a pretty universal system of colour contrasts perceived the same way by everyone. If there's a literature out there on "weird" colour harmonies that don't work for those acculturated in certain cultures, I'd love to see it.

I was conflating terms, didn't have my morning cup. There are only a limited number of contrasts to play with so there is a general consensus on how to abuse them and that is near universal. Not so much incomprehensible, just a new way of thinking and slightly jarring. See Picasso and the African masks.

I only took a quick look but I did find this little paper on cultural differences between Americans/East Asian in terms of uniqueness/conformity in visual media and how that propagates outward. [PDF] http://php.scripts.psu.edu/faculty/n/x/nxy906/COMPS/indivdua...

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