Music of Light

Jonathan Ree’s delightful I See A Voiceglances at Enlightenment-era efforts to work out analogies between color and musical harmonies.

Newton’s Optics was key. He argued that “just as all different tones can be located on a single scale running from the highest to the lowest pitch of audible sound, so all the different colours must have their place on a single skill of visible light.” Newton first discovered five colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet) but later added orange and indigo, thus introducing all schoolchildren since to the venerable Roy G. Biv. Seven colors in the spectrum was much better than five, since “it helped clinch his analogy between light and sound” (26-7).

Newton went about the whole thing, as we would expect, with a scientist’s decorum. In Paris, the Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel tried to turn the same analogy into vaudeville, experimenting for many years to create a color-harpsichord that would flash colors as the keyboard was played. He was not successful. One of his instruments, built in 1754, used a hundred candles, and there were plans to create a keyboard that worked 500 lamps (28-30). 

Ree argues that color-harpsichords were unworkable not because the audience was untrained, but because of the differences between the qualities of light and sound: “Music depends on the ways sounds combine with each other, and  . . . the effect of mixing colors is quite different from that of mixing tones. . . . beams of light pass chastely through each other without being affected at all, whereas sound waves are constantly colliding and combining and mutually interfering.” As Ree nicely puts it, “Sounds . . . always have a special kind of complexity. In a way . . . there is no such thing as a simple sound . . . . there is, you might say, something peculiarly sociable about sounds: they only come into their own in each other’s company” (31, 33).