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Blue is the Colour

from Here Comes the Train by Mr. Ben

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about

This track bears the most explanation, because it will initially seem a little odd: it's not a rainbow.

Pre-pandemic I taught a class called "Little Larks" which was an introduction to musicianship and songwriting for 5-7 year-olds, and over the course of developing that program I got really interested in the idea of "perfect pitch," which is where someone can identify a note just by hearing it. I've known people with PP and was fascinated by this seemingly extra-sensory ability. I sometimes asked them if they could associate colours with the notes, and they always could, and the strangest part was that the colours they identified would often be the same from person-to-person.

Now, sound and colour are just waves at different frequencies, with sound in the low end of the spectrum (e.g. A is tuned to 440Hz) and light at the other end (the colour red is about 400-480THz), and people with PP say that identifying a note is like being able to identify yellow or purple. Prevailing wisdom (a dubious phrase, sorry) is that PP is instilled before about age 6, so I wondered if there was any way I could help kids develop it in my class, and that's how this song was born:

Starting on D and going through a major scale, this song uses the colour names that correlate with the notes to try to get kids to remember the "sound of the colours," and each line is a single repeated note, ascending, all the way back to the octave "blue/D."

see www.flutopedia.com/sound_color.htm for more reading...

lyrics

Blue is the colour of the ocean
Purple is the colour of grapes
Pink is the colour of flamingos
Red is the colour of a fire truck
Yellow is the colour of bananas
Green is the colour of a frog
Turquoise is the colour of a swimming pool
Blue is the colour of the sky

Blue is the colour of the ocean
Purple is the colour of plums
Pink is the colour of a cherry blossom
Red is the colour of an apple
Yellow is the colour of a dandelion
Green is the colour of a lime
Turquoise is the colour of a robin's egg
Blue is the colour of the sky

Blue is the colour of the ocean
Purple is the colour of an eggplant
Pink is the colour of a dragonfruit
Red is the colour of a tomato
Yellow is the colour of a goldfinch
Green is the colour of a cactus
Turquoise is the colour of a peacock's feather
Blue is the colour of the sky

credits

from Here Comes the Train, released April 7, 2023

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Mr. Ben Hamilton, Ontario

Mr. Ben is a Hamilton-based kids musician and educator. His first album, the Bumblebee EP, was released in 2011 shortly after opening for Fred Penner.

Since then, he has released 5 full-length studio albums & an album of lullabies, and is poised to release a 6th record in the spring on 2023.

He plays regular monthly shows in Dundas as well as making the circuit of summer and fall festivals. ... more

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