A Rainbow in Tones

Grammy-award winning composer Caroline Shaw takes us on a journey through the colours in sound. She explores how composers use their paint brushes to draw light to hidden qualities within tones.

Sounds have been described as having colours since the very first writings on music. And many composers have played with the idea - or even their own lived experience of - synaesthesia: the perception of sound combinations as having chromatic, visual qualities.

In this three-part series, Caroline Shaw explores how composers have used humanity's seemingly universal urge to directly and metaphorically associate sound with colour in their compositions to vivid emotional and musical effect: literally "rendering" the tones, melodies and harmonies of their compositions in specific shades, but also in ways that evoke more general arrays of sparkling and twinkling; velvety mellifluence, and piercing shards of clarity, experiences that would be described in more modern times as "Klangfarbenmelodien" - tone colour melodies.

This first episode features music from Monteverdi to Messiaen, Debussy to Duke Ellington.

Produced by James Taylor
An Overcoat Media production for BBC Radio 3