Walt Disney once said: “Pure fantasy is revealed… action controlled by a musical motif has great appeal in the realm of unreality“. In 1940, Fantasia was born, an animated film consisting of seven short films, where, in certain scenes, the presentation of some of the most famous classical music compositions is accompanied by the vision of images and colours. It is an overwhelming and ambitious symbiosis of colours, sounds and imagination.
It is amazing how much the human brain can associate a sound with a more or less intense colour or light. This phenomenon is called ‘synesthesia’, i.e. when an auditory, olfactory, tactile or visual stimulation is perceived as two distinct but coexisting sensory events. It is possible, for example, to ‘see’ a sound or ‘hear’ a colour. Think, for example, of saying: “See music in colour!”.
Attempts to translate musical effects into painting and vice versa go back a very long way: Isaac Newton investigated a possible correspondence of the seven colours of the light spectrum with the intervals of a musical scale, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe created The Colour Theory and Louis Bertrand Castel became famous for his Coloured Piano where each key corresponded to a colour.
The one who profoundly succeeded in theorising music-colour synesthesia as a sensory function and implementing it as an artistic idea was Vasily Vasil’evič Kandinsky.
Kandinsky was convinced that painting should be similar to music and that colours should increasingly assimilate to sounds. In his writing ‘The Spiritual of Art’, published in 1910, the artist, comparing the various arts, stated:
“The richest teaching comes from music. With few exceptions, music has for some centuries been the art that does not use its means to imitate natural phenomena, but to express the psychic life of the artist and create the life of sounds.”
Kandinsky juxtaposed yellow, volcanic and bursting, with the sound of a trumpet; red, warm and vital, with the sound of a tuba; light blue with the sound of a flute; dark blue, deep and intense like the sea, with the sound of an organ; green with the violin; orange with a bell of medium sound.
Music evokes emotions and is one of the main characters which accompanies the sensory experience in a spa. So how do you create the right playlist? There are no pre-established rules, but it is also true that music inside the Spa is not chosen at random, but carefully selected according to the environment, the situation, the type of treatment, the Spa direction, and sometimes even the emotional state of the operator. First of all, all music can be taken into account, both sung and instrumental. Even better, however, is classical music. Perfect is the piano, and the white noises of nature, natural stress relievers because they have a cadenced rhythm and tend to be slow.
Therefore, also perfect for pregnant women. When we listen to it, the heart tunes into the rhythm itself, and the beats begin to slow down. At the same time, the brain will begin to relax, disconnecting. This process takes about five minutes. The right music activates a whole virtuous circle in the brain that also stimulates the action of neurotransmitters to release pleasure-related substances: when listening to music, our organism responds promptly. Music, in fact, acts by harmonising the four breath times: inhalation, short apnoea, exhalation and another very short apnoea.
So, the next time you enter a spa or get rocked during a massage, close your eyes, let yourself go by listening to the background music and let your mind go wandering and give life to images, emotions and colours.
“The one who profoundly succeeded in theorising music-colour synaesthesia as a sensory function and implementing it as an artistic idea was Vasily Vasil’evič Kandinsky.”
Article published in the third edition of the magazine New Hospitality Lux
Martina Zecca
Spa Director, Spa&Beauty Trainer e Spa Project Manager