Experimental Determination of Laws of Color Harmony. Part 1: Harmony Content of Different Scales with Similar Hue

In 1956 we came to the decision at the Budapest Technical University to start large scale experiments on color harmony. The experiments and the processing of the experimental results have been completed in 2006, after 50 years of research work. Within the frame of the experiments 95 000 participants have carried out more than 36 million elementary observations and made elementary decisions. Only certain parts of the experimental results have been published up to now. This article starts publishing the results not published yet. Research work on color harmony carried out during these 50 years can be categorized into seven main groups. The present article deals with the group of experiments testing how much the harmony content of the scales found in different locations in various positions of the axial sections of the Coloroid color system differ from each other. Our experiments were focused to three groups: we examined the variations in the extent of harmony content in the following cases (1) scales carried by lines with different angles to the gray axis, consisting of colors having the same number of harmony intervals between them, (2) scales consisting of colors being parallel to the gray axis, featuring various saturations, having different harmony intervals between them, and (3) scales perpendicular to the gray axis, with different luminosity, having different harmony intervals between each other. The examined color scales contained six colors in each experiment. Experiments were carried out for 24 different axial sections of the Coloroid color system. After 15-years interruption experiments were repeated; however, with compositions of different appearances. 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 32, 477 – 488, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www. interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20357