Experimental Determination of the Laws of Color Harmony. Part 4: Color Preference and the Color Harmony Content

In 1956, we decided at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics to start a large-scale experiment on color harmony. The experiments and the processing of the experimental results have been completed in 2006. These experiments, described in this article, form a study of how much are people, participating in the experiment, influenced by their own personal color preference in judging the harmony content of a composition. These experiments have utilized the results of former (1958–1969) color preference experiments and the system of color preference indexes, which were developed by the generalization of those results. Within the framework of these experiments, conducted between 1998 and 2006 there were 24 compositions, shown to the participants, at first one by one, then in pairs and at last in groups of six. They had to assess the harmony content of the compositions and award a score on a scale between 0 and 10. Each composition possessed a specific amount of harmony content according to the rules of color space, based on the Coloroid harmony threshold and verified by former experiments. In these experiments the number of elementary observations were 135 568. The people participating in the experiment were approximately equal number of men and women, from the age group between 10 and 70 years. During processing, by using the color preference numerical indexing system, we compared the results of those experiments with the color preference of a similar age group, by using color compositions, identical to the ones used in the present experiment. We have found that the sensation of the color harmony and its intensity have a strong relation to how the observers relate to colors and also their color preferences. The sensation of color harmony is also influenced by the gender and the age of the observer. 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 34, 210 – 224, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www. interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20489