In July of 2005 Concrete the Studio featured an abstract expressionist who painted while listening to multiple audio sources playing at once. The sounds he surrounded himself with would affect the final palette and feel of his work, which is a phenomenon known as Synesthesia.

To illustrate this blending of the senses at our Studio show, Concrete built a simple Flash based experiment where people would hear a sound, and then choose a color to match it. The voter could add some commentary as to why they saw this connection, and was then rewarded with a creative visual representation of which colors were more popular. (see it at work here!)

With no promotion beyond a link from the wikipedia page on synesthesia and word of mouth referrals, the original Color of Sound experiment received over 23,000 votes in 9 months. The site recently won the Silver Summit Creative Award for emerging media, and was nominated for a Webby award in the Net Art category.

Responding to this public interest, Concrete has turned what was a fixed experience into a community driven collection of songs and sounds that anyone can add to and vote on. “In the spirit of AmIhotOrNot.com, YouTube.com, and Flickr.com, the idea is to let people connect in new ways around a simple opinion system,” says Concrete President, Franz Maruna. “What band wouldn’t want to see how the public visualizes their unique sound? It’s fascinating to see that the majority of people think that Beastie Boys sound brown and The Rapture sounds purple.”

The new site ColorOfMySound.com lets members with a valid email address upload MP3’s, assign genre tags and categories to them, and invite the public to assign colors to their tracks. Comments and votes can easily be counted and browsed by color. Visitors can browse by specific types of audio or genre tags, or can just listen to whatever has been added most recently on the home page. Check out the site, and vote for Color Of Sound for people’s choice at the Webby awards!

About Concrete CMS

Concrete CMS is dedicated to making the web a useful place through simplifying content management. Based on open source technology, Concrete CMS is entirely object oriented and supports over 10,000 simultaneous users. The flexible architecture allows the rapid extension of core functionality. For over three years, Concrete has built online applications for organizations including Microsoft, Logitech, the Ad Council, and PECI.