G.F Smith
G.F Smith is a heritage paper company supplying designers and brands all over the world. They approached us to create a soundscape inspired by Colorplan, one of their signature paper collections featuring 55 distinct colours. While the soundscape would initially accompany an installation titled Portal: A Journey Through Colour, the project was ultimately developed into a vinyl record, allowing the sonic interpretation of the Colorplan palette to exist as a lasting physical artefact.
Our challenge was to translate colour, something inherently visual, into sound. Each of the 55 colours in the Colorplan range needed its own sonic expression, raising the question: what does colour sound like?
Colour carries emotional, cultural, and sensory associations, but these interpretations vary widely from person to person. Rather than imposing fixed meanings onto each hue, we needed to develop a system that allowed colours to be expressed through sound while remaining open to interpretation.
The result was a library of sounds that could interact with one another just as colours do: blending, contrasting, harmonising, and occasionally clashing. Whether experienced within the installation or later on vinyl, the composition had to capture the dynamic relationships between colours, translating the palette into a living musical structure.
We wanted to challenge the assumption that colour is purely a visual experience, drawing inspiration from Synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon where senses overlap and one stimulus triggers another.
All instruments were recorded in G major so the sounds could combine fluidly, ensuring that any interaction between colours produced a coherent musical result.
The result
The project ultimately became a vinyl record translating colour into sound. The score was pressed to vinyl as a 20-minute composition capturing the full sonic journey of Portal.
To celebrate the physical format, G.F Smith partnered with Manchester School of Art to commission ten unique record sleeves, each designed by a different student from the school. The result is a limited collection where every pressing carries a different artwork, ten interpretations of the same sonic piece, echoing the diversity and expressiveness of the Colorplan colour system itself.
The record transforms the project from a temporary installation into a collectible artefact, a meeting point between sound, colour, paper, and graphic design.
