ColorSounds was a national music video program televised on PBS stations in the mid-1980s. ColorSounds taught viewers how to read and speak the English language creatively through the use of music videos.
In this series, a music video, the same one that would appear on channels such as MTV and VH1 is presented, with the lyrics shown karaoke-style on the bottom of the screen, with words associated with the video's focus highlighted in various colors. For example, if a music video featured nouns, every noun in the lyrics would be highlighted in red; accordingly, if another music video featured vowels sounds such as "a" all the a's would be highlighted in gray. ColorSounds presented an effective learning program through its multimodal approach to teaching and learning language.
In addition, ColorSounds also made note of and corrected spelling mistakes and poor grammar in the original lyrics.
The show had on air hosts who would introduce each song and conduct live interviews with the musicians of bands featured in the music videos such as B.B. King, Kool & The Gang, Carl Anderson, Sting, Phil Collins, TOTO, and Julian Lennon to name a few. The songs were captioned and the words color coded pertaining to the lesson or topic to be covered in that particular song of the show segment. The show's first on air talent and associate producer was Jane Story, a University of Texas at Austin Communications graduate who majored in Radio/Television/Film. The show's founder and executive producer was University of Texas at Austin Professor/Linguist J. Michael Bell, PhD. Both the show ColorSounds and Story were nominated for two daytime Emmys in the category of best educational show and best performance, most notably for their production and performance of the segments "Rock and Read." In addition, ColorSounds, Bell and Story received the prestigious "Literacy Award" from Barbara Bush for the "Rock and Read" series.
Color Sounds was packaged in two formats—a 30-minute version for general PBS scheduling, and a 15-minute version for use during in-school telecasts.
Famous quotes containing the words color and/or sounds:
“Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything”
—William Stanley Merwin (b. 1927)
“For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)