Explorations Synesthésiques collection — 417 Œuvres dans 36 séries d’Arnaud Quercy

Excerpt: A visual art practice translating musical harmony into color and form, bridging auditory experience with chromatic expression through works inspired by composers from Rachmaninov to Miles Davis.

This question has followed me for years, and it sits at the heart of Synesthetic Explorations, a body of work in which sound becomes visible. Rather than illustrating music or following rigid color–tone correspondences, I try to translate what harmony does — its emotional pressure, its resonance, its physicality — into color, shape, and spatial tension.

In the simplest structures, such as octaves, I find a profound sense of unity. A single pitch repeating across registers feels like a widening wave: complete, stable, yet expansive. In works inspired by Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C Major, this becomes a progression of reds building into a silent crescendo — layers of sound turning into layers of color.

Jazz invites another kind of visual thinking. When I work with the introspective phrasing of Miles Davis, the palette shifts: green, yellow-orange, blue-green. These hues echo the emotional depth of F# minor, a key that hovers between melancholy and warmth. The shapes loosen, too — allowing improvisation, pauses, and surprises. Jazz, in paint, becomes a balance between structure and divergence.

More formal pieces, such as those inspired by Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat Major, call for bolder rhythms. Blues, reds, and purples pulse like the proud cadence of the polonaise — a visual architecture built from resonance and resolve. On the other side of the spectrum, the lyricism of Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” lends itself to gentler transitions, where color behaves like memory: shifting, layered, and softly uncertain.

Certain keys carry an emotional gravity of their own. In works exploring F minor, drawn partly from Chopin’s concerto, I use deep red-purple and blue to express a quiet kind of sorrow — not dramatic, but contemplative, like a space where sound and silence hold equal meaning. And in pieces inspired by Bach’s Mass in B Minor, I let deep green, yellow, and orange form a kind of “visual mass” — a balance between sacred intensity and human fragility.

Across these explorations, color becomes another way of listening. The works suggest that harmony can be experienced through more than the ear — that each chord carries a visual presence waiting to be revealed. Ultimately, Synesthetic Explorations is an invitation: to see sound, to listen with the eyes, and to feel music in a new, chromatic language.

Related Terms

Chromesthesia
Color Music
Sound Visualization
Cross-Modal Perception
Tone Color

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