One Song, Three Composers

CentralTrak, The University of Texas at Dallas Artists Residency, Texas, USA, 2011

One Song, Three Composers was an exhibition developed during an artist residency at CentralTrak at the University of Texas at Dallas. The work investigated three distinct theories of sound-colour correspondence, each assigning a specific colour to the twelve notes of the musical octave. These systems were drawn from the writings and practices of Louis Bertrand Castel, Michael Smither, and Richard Merrick. Through geometric abstraction, the exhibition examined the relationships and tensions between these approaches, extending the idea of sound beyond pitch to include duration, loudness, and timbre.

A performance-based component was developed in collaboration with Smither, who created a series of “scan cards”: square cards divided into a grid of nine equal squares in colours aligned with his note and colour system. Local musicians were invited to perform using these cards as scores, reading colour and geometry in place of conventional musical notation.

The project extended beyond CentralTrak to multiple sites, including all nine universities within the University of Texas network, the Longview Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of East Texas. Across these contexts, One Song, Three Composers functioned as a single, evolving work that translated one conceptual “song” through three compositional logics, testing how sound, colour, and structure could be re-authored across visual, performative, and institutional spaces.