Experimental determination of laws of color harmony. Part 3: Harmony content of different hue pairs

At the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 1956, we decided to start large‐scale experiments on color harmony. The experiments and the processing of the experimental data were completed in 2006. The experiments described in this article were based on a long established experience that harmony content of different hue pairs greatly differ from each other. The vast majority of former research activities on the subject of color harmony narrowed down mostly to investigations of saturated color pairs. Color samples of our experiments have been defined within the color space of the Coloroid color system, built on harmony thresholds. The compositions, prepared for the experiments, always consisted of two saturated hues and three low saturation colors of each hue at varying brightness, making it a total of eight colors. Within the framework of the experiments, 48 hues were used. Out of these, each of the 24 was formed into composition pairs with the remaining 48 hues, forming a total of 852 compositions. The paired‐comparison experiments were conducted with the use of the compositions prepared by collage technique. Color samples made of painted paper, between 1980 and 1985, have been repeated between 2002 and 2006 with the same color selection but with computer‐generated pseudorandom patch system compositions. It has been established that harmony content of hue pairs can be expressed by the relative angle of their hue planes in the Coloroid color space. The harmony content of hue pairs exceeds that of other pairs, when this angle is below 10°, between 30° and 40°, between 130° and 140° or near to 180°. Those color pairs of which hue planes are between 60° and 90° to each other in Coloroid color space, exhibit the least harmony content. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 34, 33–44, 2009.