COLOUR MUSIC IN AUSTRALIA:

de-mystifying De Maistre.

2: APPLIED MATHEMATICS
1: PAINTING BY NUMBERS
2: APPLIED MATHEMATICS
3: BRAIN WAVES
4: FOCUSED VISIONS
5: FASHION CHANGES
6: THE PAINTINGS

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It was commonly held that Pythagoras, in the 6th century BC, had investigated sounds coming
from a smithy. The blacksmith's hammers, of various sizes, made different notes on striking the
anvil. In fact, the followers of Pythagoras had refined music's principals with the aid of a
monochord, a single-stringed musical instrument. By dividing the string into proportions of its
length (similar to the way the neck of a guitar is divided by frets), an harmonic series of notes was
arrived at. The octave interval, basic to most tuning methods, was established by dividing a string
length exactly in two. The full string and the half-string make sounds that uncannily resemble each
other, though they are of markedly different pitches (like a bass and a soprano singing the same
note). When sounded together, the different notes should not interfere with each other; if they were
even slightly out of tune, interference could be heard as fluctuations called beats. Dividing the
string by three or other odd numbers produced different notes, also considered harmonious.
Using ratios between the numbers one, two, three and four, Pythagoreans divided the
monochord into related pitches. As a result, they fixed music with immutable mathematical laws
from which musical modes were elaborated. The origins of mathematics in ancient Greece were
inextricably entwined with musical thought, which had ethical as well as aesthetic force in Greek
society. All manner of knowledge was ascribed to Pythagoras, and his name still adheres to
fundamental music intervals. Those who invoke him are claiming, by proxy, to be fellow initiates in
the universal mysteries available to the Pythagorean cult. Newton, for one, cited their authority in
support of his own axioms; he speculated that the celebrated philosopher of antiquity had
uncovered the secret to measuring the heavens, by experimenting with proportions of weights and
string lengths. Of course, the legend is untrue - the bit about Pythagoras and the smithy, I mean.
Any notes the blacksmith struck would depend very much on the mass and shape of the anvil,
rather than on the size of his hammers.

In 1634, Marin Mersenne published the first systematic study of harmonics, as "Harmonie
Universelle". By experiment, he established that the pitch of a bowed note was determined by the
frequency at which the string vibrated. In turn, frequency depended on the properties of an
individual string - its length and diameter as well as the tension applied to it. Mersenne's findings
could be expressed as an algebraic formula that we can recognise today. But the vibration of a
string, and the sounds it produced, were even more complex: two thousand years previously,
Aristotle had noted an extra sound, an octave higher, could be faintly heard when a string was
plucked. Mersenne heard it too, as well as another four or five harmonious tones, ever higher and
fainter. We now know the extra sounds as partials or overtones, an harmonic series that
accompanies the fundamental note. They contribute to the quality of the note, to its timbre, and a
patient listener may be able to detect some of these overtones.
In the mid-17th century, harmonics offered a true mathematico-experimental framework. Two
Oxford musicians, Thomas Pigot and William Noble, investigated sympathetic resonance, where
notes played on one instrument set corresponding strings in motion on a nearby instrument. They
discovered that small pieces of paper, folded over the sympathetic string at certain points, were not
dislodged when the string vibrated. The still places divided the resonant string into several equal
parts. John Wallace reported the results to the Royal Society in 1677, adding that plucking a string
at any of these still points, "will give no clear Sound at all; but very confused". Joseph Sauveur,
the French pioneer of acoustics, named these places 'nodes' in 1701. Sauveur would take
Mersenne's investigations much further, tabulating frequencies of many sounds and their
overtones independent of any musical context. Isaac Newton borrowed some of Sauveur's acoustic
data for the second edition of "Principia", though more conventional theoretical music held sway in
"Opticks", structuring his colour-music code. The music-loving mathematician Brooke Taylor,
using Newtonian mechanics, was the first to calculate the simplest shape of a vibrating string in
1715. (It was a sine curve.) As more and more complex problems emerged, the science of sound
became a specialist pursuit. Acoustics and the theory of music began to part company.
When the unfettered string XY vibrates, it moves up and down in the shape of
the sine curve 1. This is its fundamental tone, or first harmonic, the deepest
note it can sound. When cut at A, the string and its fundamental wavelength are
reduced by half. XA oscillates in the form of curve 2, twice as fast as the full
string, XY, and its tone is pitched an octave higher. Halving again, the quarter-
string XB vibrates in the shape of the sine curve 4, and the note rises another
octave above that of XA. The unimpeded string, XY, is capable of vibrating in a
combination of these curves, adding the second and fourth harmonics to its
sound.
Illustration 1 : THE HARMONICS OF 'PYTHAGORUS'.

To some extent, these (and many other) quicker movements are present in
the note produced by XY. Each harmonic can be heard by lightly touching
the string at a node - those still-points of oscillation, at A or B. In musical
practice, the string is pressed hard, to effectively shorten its length and
produce an entirely new note with its own characteristic harmonics. It was
important to Pythagoreans (as well as many later theorists) that any new
note should be mathematically related to the harmonics of the original
string.
The manner in which a note is played, along with the sympathetic vibrations of surrounding
strings and from the body of the musical instrument, result in a characteristic timbre. An
instrument such as the violin will produce its richest sound when played in keys, such as A or D,
which are aligned to the fixed tuning of its strings. A 'remote' key, such as F# major, produces less
resonance; Paul Robertson of the Medici Quartet and the psychiatrist Peter Fenwick have noted
that the combination of unfamiliar vibrations and difficult hand positions involved in the key of F#
can put the violinist into a strange state, making a piece of music in that key feel strange. Different
emotional states may also be associated with particular musical keys for historic reasons. Some
keyless wind instruments of the Baroque period could only play in fixed keys and we have inherited
that tradition of musical pitch to some degree, in spite of the greater flexibility of modern
instruments. The bright edge of the brass was heard to best advantage in the keys of C or D, while
keys of E or B flats were the natural provenance for the soft plaintiveness of the woodwinds.
Musical systems had been evolving for two millennia since Pythagoras, but they still contained
potential discords. In medieval modal systems, whose main pillars were the octave, fourth and
fifth, discrepancies were unavoidable: a cycle of perfect fifths or fourths never quite matches a
corresponding cycle of octaves, differing by a small amount called the Pythagorean comma. (The
ancient Greeks knew this, and Boethius gave calculations for the comma's value as well as that of
other subtleties, such as the schisma.) In the 1500s, the Aeolian mode (based on A) and the Ionian
(based on C) were introduced for liturgical use. These permitted greater flexibility in harmony
singing and foreshadowed the A minor and C major keys comprising the white notes on keyboards.
Still, to make pleasant music, singers had to adjust notes by small amounts as they went along - a
process known as musica ficta. Clever composers, such as Adrian Willaert in the 16th century,
could shift the tonal centre of a piece through many modes.

On instruments with fixed tuning, one answer to the dilemma was to make small adjustments to
some pitches. A more homogeneous gamut of notes could be achieved by sacrificing their
theoretical purity. As early as the 14th century, some organs had been built with multiple manuals
and split keys to accommodate the vagaries of tuning. Clavichords and harpsichords, virginals and
spinets, became popular with the growing bourgeoisie in the 15th century, providing fully-fleshed
music to the homes of those with leisure enough to practice and enjoy music. But these instruments
also had limitations: because each string's tension remained fixed throughout a performance,
certain notes would require adjustment if the performer wished to change into another mode.
Retuning the instrument was a tricky chore, and the ability to modulate within any piece of music
was restricted.
Gradually, the ancient modes gave way to the key structure that dominates modern music. While
the octave interval remained mathematically exact, only traces of musical modes remained in the
internal structures of major and minor scales. In exchange, the musician gained the ability to play
in any key, without retuning the instrument, and to thus modulate from key to key within the one
piece. By the end of the 17th century, theorists like Andreas Werckmeister had devised methods to
iron out the niceties of Pythagorean music, and Baroque composers commonly employed types of
'meantone' tuning. Johann Kuhnau's "Keyboard Practice", of 1689, contained seven partitas in
ascending major keys (C, D, E, F, G, A, and B flat); a second volume of 1692 consisted of a similar
sequence, in minor keys (c, d, e, f, g, a, and b). Using a meantone tuning, it was possible to play
Kuhnau's major partitas in B flat, C, D, F, G, and A, and minor partitas in g, d, and a. Even so, the
remaining works (E, b, c, e, and f) would have required retuning of the instrument. Keys had
distinctive sounds, "for the expression of different passions" according to Marc-Antoine
Charpentier's "Rules of Composition", around 1692. G minor was the serious key; previously, the
serious mode had been the Dorian, related to the note D.
Apparently, Jacques Ozanam’s mathematical dictionary of 1691 was the first to list all 24 keys –a
major and a minor key for each of the twelve semitones. Music theorists followed suit early in the
18th century. The French guitarist François Campion wrote of the Rule of the Octave in 1716,
showing ascending and descending scales for each of the 24 keys, and the appropriate chords to
harmonize each note. Keyboards, with their many fixed strings, required special care in tuning.
Their middle C, and the white-note scale of C major would gain pre-eminence, as the basis on
which all musical keys depended. The publication of J. S. Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier" of 1722,
heralded the triumph of a tempered scale, in which all notes were most nicely spaced. (No-one
knows, in fact, exactly what temperament Bach may have used.) Like his predecessor Kuhnau, Bach
began his cyclic work at C. Moving up the scale semitone by semitone, he provided four pieces
(preludes and fugues in both major and minor keys) for each of the notes - 48 works in all. As if
this were not enough, Bach repeated the exercise with Book II in 1744. Each piece modulated from
its native key to related ones and back again, while retaining a distinct flavour of its own due to
slight, residual unevenness in the tempering.

Illustration 2 :
DESCARTES' JOHN BULL'S
MUSICAL "SPHERA
SCALE MUNDI"
René Descartes' diagram of a tempered diatonic octave (left), first conceived in 1618, was published in
"Compendium Musicae" of 1650. His pie chart, with some adjustments, served as a prototype for the colour music
wheel Newton developed towards the end of the century. As a philosopher and mathematician, Descartes was
concerned for an ideal but useful arrangement of just ratios, dividing a single octave that forms the circumference of
a circle. (Note the schisma, for adjusting the tone on either side, from minor to major.) This theoretical pragmatism is
of a different order to the utility required by practicing musicians.
In 1621, John Bull formed a double round-canon into circles (right), to echo the cyclic form of the music and
represent the heavenly and earthly spheres suggested by its title. The musical score contains a whole melody,
rather than Descartes' single octave. (Its shape is little different to the circular music depicted in Dosso Dossi's
"Allegory of Music", painted almost a hundred years earlier.) Usually, Bull's compositions went well beyond the
technical constraints of Descartes' system - for his virtuoso performances, he even had organs custom-built with
fully-extended chromatic keyboards.

At its theoretical extremes, harmonic science had little to do with real music practice, and
scientists had to play catch-up. Isaac Newton attacked the problems of musical tuning like a
mathematical puzzle. Arithmetic, geometrical and logarithmic methods, as well as a customised
units of 'microtones', were applied to diatonic and chromatic scales, to tuning systems including
just intonation and varying temperaments. Ultimately all such attempts produce compromises, so
Newton finally separated the octave's notes with an array of just ratios arranged in a palindrome - a
series that reads the same way backwards as forwards - to provide a pleasing mathematical
symmetry. In this form, an antiquated Dorian mode was likened to the array of pure colours in
Newton's "Opticks" of 1704. His analogy satisfied only the most general notions of harmonic
science. The colour music wheel was somewhat contrived, with sizes of notes generalized and
colour areas approximated (though Newton misleadingly presented his results as a genuine
discovery, made from objective measurement). Accepted musical practice was already far in
advance of the approach he took in dividing colour into ROYGBIV. Many other existing formats, of
scales and modes, could have loosely matched the distribution of prominent colours in the
spectrum.
While contemporaries could justly criticize the relevance of Newton's musical mathematics, this
did not affect the validity of his observations on the nature of light. With marvellous skill he
unravelled white light and reconstituted it, mixing coloured lights in unprecedented ways. The
colour-music code was almost as relevant to this purpose as the recently discovered sine law of
refraction, allowing Newton to deck out Descartes' geometrical rainbow in its colours. "Opticks"
started from simple experiments with a prism - "the usefullest Instrument Men have yet imploy'd
about the Contemplation of Colours", according to Boyle. Thus, tentative observations begun in the
13th century, with quartz crystals and glass flasks, were brought to fulfilment. Newton couched his
findings in a framework of geometrical optics, a tradition dating back to Alhazan in the 11th
century, and thence through Ptolemy to Euclid. The exploration of coloured properties of light,
only partially explored by others, entered the realm of modern science with Newton's "Opticks".
Along with it, for better or worse, came an articulated colour-music code.

Louis-Bertrand Castel explored the practical possibilities of colour music as early as 1725. He
discovered the idea of colour music from Newton's "Opticks", which he had reviewed in its French
edition. Castel proposed a 'harpsichord for eyes', a keyboard instrument which would displayed a
patch of colour whenever a note was struck. At first, he aligned spectral colours with the white-note
scale of C major. The usual order of ROY G BIV was reversed (as indeed it was for some prism
experiments in Newton's book); red coincided with a high b, and the colours ran down the octave to
violet on the note C. His musical scale of C was orthodox, representing the contemporary standard
rather than Newton's old-fashioned Dorian mode on D. While admiring Newton as a
mathematician, Castel thought his physics uninspired, feeling "there is no need to borrow
ambiguous traits from Descartes or Newton to embellish the work of God". Castel put aside his
original Newtonianism, to hail the earlier colour music theories of Athanasias Kircher instead.
Encouraged by the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, Castel also embraced a triadic theory of
musical harmony. He emphasized the notes C, E and G, which make up the common chord of C
major, by allotting them the painters' primary colours of blue, yellow and red. The primaries began
with blue on C, at the bottom of the octave, since Castel considered it potentially the darkest of the
three. There, the expressive capabilities of blue could best represent the musical ground-base, so
important to the theories of Rameau. By 1734, Castel had begun to build his first 'ocular
harpsichord', using twelve hues of colour aligned to a twelve-note chromatic scale. Each hue was
varied further, by twelve degrees of tone from light to dark, so Castel could cycle his scheme
through many octaves.

Illustration 3 : NEWTON'S FIRST COLOUR MUSIC (left) &

(right) CASTEL'S HARPSICHORD FOR THE EYES.

In 1675, Isaac Newton plotted the colours emerging from a prism against the musical divisions of a monochord.
Shown here on a keyboard, the ROYGBIV colours - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - run down the
scale, right to left. Each occupies the space between two keys (not on any note or semitone), whereas Castel
allocated colours to precise tones, of both ebonies and ivories. Taking the C scale as the natural range of the human
voice (rather than Newton's Dorian mode on D), Castel listed the ascending twelve colours in 1735, as follows: sky
blue, celadon, green, olive, yellow, fallow, nacarat, red, carmine, violet, agate and violaceous. To achieve higher or
lower octaves, he lightened or darkened the colours (shown above by different Bs, and Cs). He preferred the
"material and normal colours" of painters to the "accidental colours, like the incorporeal ones of the prism and
rainbow".
Castel gave the primaries blue, yellow, and red to the chord of C major, a triad of C, E and G. The famous composer
Rameau had emphasized such harmonies in 1726, deriving his theory in turn on acoustic findings by Joseph
Sauveur, published in 1701. Rameau cited the harmonic series as the 'natural' means for generating harmonies: it
could be detected in many sounding bodies, as overtones emitted along with the fundamental note. Just as a single
sound was a complex of notes, so too Newton demonstrated that white light - indeed, most colour in the natural
world - was in fact composed of a spectrum of individual colours. A spectral progression can still be traced in
Castel's colour-music scheme, despite his objections. (It starts around G#.) Likewise, painters' primaries put in an
appearance when Newton ran ROY G BIV up the scale (as he frequently did). Then red, yellow, and blue would sit
beside D, F, and A, the minor chord on the tonic, D.

Castel's endeavours captured Enlightenment imagination, to provide a talking point throughout

Europe. In Germany, the composer Telemann praised his marvellous instrument, saying, "This
play of colours will please, for music is nothing but a pleasure". The mathematician Leonard Euler
doubted that the fluttering, coloured cloths of Castel's harpsichord could afford enjoyment. He
preferred an analogy with artwork, since "painting rather seems to be that to the eye which music
is to the ear". Voltaire was skeptical, too: he dubbed Castel "the Don Quixote of mathematics", and
suspected his performances would "shock, dazzle and exhaust the sight". In St Petersburg, the
Imperial Academy of Sciences held a public meeting in 1742, to discuss the merits of colour music.
Whether colour came from vibrations of the aether, as sound was carried by vibrating air, was
debate by learned gentlemen. One question on the agenda asked: "Can colours, if arranged in a
particular manner, provide a deaf person with the same type of enjoyment as we experience
when our ears perceive a harmonious consonance of musical tones?" In the French encyclopaedia,
Denis Diderot rendered homage to Castel, and took a special visitor to his workshop in 1751:

"My deaf mute imagined that this inventor of genius was equally deaf and mute; that he
used his harpsichord to communicate with other people; that each colour shade on the
keyboard had the value of one of the letters of the alphabet; and that by way of the keys
and the agility of his fingers, he combined these letters and formed words, phrases..."

Other enthusiasts suggested their own colour-music codes, and some even went so far as to
design a colour keyboard. In 1743, J G Krüger sketched an ocular harpsichord, "to delight the eye
by the alternation and blending of the seven colours just as much as the ear by the seven tones".
He took Newton's ROY G BIV for his colours and arranged them along a C scale. Beginning with
violet on the lower C, his code was identical to Castel's first attempt (which was later rejected). But
Krüger was not satisfied with a display of coloured swatches when notes were played. He designed
his keys to move shutters and reveal glass flasks, filled with the appropriately coloured fluids. Light
from candles radiated through the liquids, and lenses and mirrors cast each colour onto a screen.
They fell as overlapping circles, with lower notes being larger in size: Krüger apparently planned
his octave to appear as a circle filled with rainbow-coloured rings, red at the centre and violet
round the rim. If he ever built the device, Krüger would have found the colours simply became
brighter and whiter towards the centre, where more and more colours fell.
At the end of the 18th century, Karl von Eckartshausen claimed to have built a very similar device
to produce colours of indescribable beauty, "for they surpass the most valuable jewels". That his
colours might all combine into an insipid white, would worry the Bavarian mystic not one jot. The
most enlightened spiritual masters, he proclaimed, were distinguished by auras of white light: they
formed a hidden élite, still revered by theosophists today, that became known as the Great White
Brotherhood. As for his harpsichord, Eckartshausen credited Castel with the original idea, and
filled his flasks with liquids "in keeping with the theory of colours". But, believing colours
expressed sentiments of the soul, he would interpret them symbolically, naturalistically, or even
synaesthetically. In a poem that accompanied his theory of ocular music, each line of words was
given directions for music and colour. A flowery meadow was predictably represented in green,
violet, and daisy yellow. A sad maiden was pink and white mixed with olive, and accompanied by a
plaintive flute; when she sang as joyfully as a lark, the colours changed to dark blue, scarlet, and
yellow-green.
Like Diderot's deaf-mute, Eckartshausen thought the ultimate purpose of colour music was to
supplement and support the written or spoken word. Others were more direct, seeking a more
worldly pleasure from the combination. And every intellectual of the Enlightenment seemed
provoked into an opinion, for or against, by Father Castel's invention. Some were rational and
scientific in their support of colour music. In 1789, Erasmus Darwin found a coincidence of
proportions between notes of a melody, and the colours of after-images - such as the blue-green
tinge that remains with the eye, after staring too long at something red. Darwin suggested an
improvement to ocular harpsichords; a newly-invented oil lamp, shining through coloured glass,
could throw a stronger light than the feeble candles Krüger and Eckartshausen employed. Colour
music was assured a modest place among the worthy subjects of science, after endorsement from
such a patriarch (his grandson was Charles, after all). Count Rumford, the noted American
physicist, was one that felt its appeal. In 1794, after repeating Newton's experiments with colour
discs, and exploring the subjective effects of coloured shadows, he ruminated on the possibility of:

"...instruments for producing that harmony for the entertainment of the eyes,
in a manner similar to that in which the ears are entertained by musical
sound."

Castel's 'harpsichord for eyes' became a de facto ancestor to the many colour organs that began
to appear in 19th century - culminating in Scriabin's tastiera per luce, designed for his 1911
premiere of "Prometheus: a poem of fire". (Unfortunately, the colour component of the
performance was dispensed with, due to technical difficulties with primitive electrical equipment.)
This work is the only major orchestral piece to include a scored part for colour, but it is rarely
performed. Scriabin's colour-music code employed an approximately spectral array of colours, but
aligned them to a cycle of fifths rather than the simple note progression of a scale. Like other
Theosophists, Scriabin tried to link moods (and even smells) to the colours and notes - C with red
and human will; G with orange and creative play; D with yellow and joy; A with green and matter;
E with blue and dreams, and so on. Scriabin's arrangement was pompous and obscure, as muddy as
Castel's, and it too never caught on as a colour-music code. When "Prometheus" was given its New
York debut in 1915, a colour organ (based on A. Wallace Rimington's patented instrument)
provided the light component. Unfortunately, light did not flood an auditorium filled with white-
clad figures, as Scriabin had envisaged, and who is to know but the colours themselves were not
rearranged, in accord with Rimington's own Newtonian code (a fairly straightforward spectral
progression up the C scale).
The technical ingenuity of the late 19th century gave rise to a number of colour music
instruments, like Rimington's or Bainbridge Bishop's (the latter being displayed by P. T. Barnum).
Typically, they took the form of a standard organ console with a screen above it, onto which
different colours were projected - usually a standard spectrum was divided into a progression to
match the C scale. The musical component of colour music was frequently eclipsed by the novelty
of colour music instruments. Thomas Wilfred, sponsored by prominent Theosophists, had devised
large spectacles in New York in 1916; he later invented the Clavilux, his light organ, to perform
Lumia concerts. By 1930, he had put the Home Clavilux on the market. Before the advent of
television, a buyer could install a cabinet in the corner of the living room that silently generated
visual imagery for days - without producing the same pattern twice.

Illustration 4 : "MUSIC IS LIKE PAINTING." Francis Picabia, 1913-17.

At first, Picabia's work (left) comes across as a seriously funny take on the European tradition of colour music. Not
only is the title an ironic reversal, giving painting precedence over music, but Picabia unashamedly plagiarized a
common scientific chart (right). It showed the effects of a magnetic field on alpha and beta particles and gamma
radiation. Ernest Rutherford had used the diagram in 1904 to describe the radioactivity of radium, and popular
science magazines reprinted the drawing. Picabia's artwork allied colour music to these recent findings in nuclear
physics. Thereby - intentionally or not - he bypassed sciences that invited comparisons of light and sound vibrations,
or those that had room for Newton's ROY G BIV.
The artist seems to lampoon the pretensions of previous colour-music codes, and mock their intellectual credibility.
But (funnily enough) Picabia might be serious, more concerned for tradition than at first it appears. After all, he
counted Ferruccio Busoni, an arranger of Bach's music, among his composer friends. The Dadaist painter indeed
made many statements connecting colour with music, none more cryptic than: "We tend towards the White
considered as a psychic entity or, in order to concretize this tendency thanks to immutable rapports of colour and
music, we tend towards 'la' pure = 435 vibrations." We are seemingly being told, in the best occult tradition of colour
music, that white and the note A have a physical correspondence and represent, in different forms, the same
psychic goal.

Colour musicians often justified their work with references to science, spirituality and the grand
order of nature, while the press shared their enthusiasm for a potentially revolutionary new art
form. After World War I, some film makers had turned their attention to colour music as an ideal
subject for abstract animations. Sometimes, they might collaborate with an artist (Viking Eggerling
with Hans Richter) or work with a colour organist (Oskar Fischinger with Alexander Laszlo). Their
valuable innovations were often obscured by later advances in mainstream film - the advent of
talkies and colour films - and public attention diverted to bowdlerized versions of colour music,
such as Disney's "Fantasia".
Not until the rock shows of the 1960s and 70s did colour music regain a large audience, with
psychedelic performances synthesizing light and sound. Pioneering work in electronics and
computing enabled animators to participate in major films as well - John Whitney's contribution to
the Stargate Corridor sequence in "2001: A Space Odyssey" being one example. The effort to co-
ordinate colour and music on domestic computers has led to further software advances. In
exploring possible interrelationship of colour and music, programmers have been obliged to
analyse anew the formal elements, to map flexible links between any arrangements of pitch, colour,
shape, movement and so on. Video makers and live performers have been able to take advantage of
the broad theories supplied by traditional colour music. Even something of its persistent mysticism
has been readily assimilated in the age of multimedia. Modern computing and animation experts
can (and often do) claim a lineage that extends back through colour organists and animators of the
early 20th century, to Castel's Ocular Harpsichord in the 18th century.
Illustration 5 : LOÏE FULLER'S DEBUT
AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE,
Jules Cheret, 1893.

Richard Wagner had put out the call for a Gesamtkunstwerk in 1850, a new kind of theatre that
would synthesize music, verse and staging into a unified, total artwork. His Beyreuth playhouse
introduced the wedge-shaped amphitheatre, hidden orchestra and darkened auditorium, to which
audiences are now accustomed. With the introduction of arc lighting (and incandescent globes
soon after), theatrical illusion was near complete. Loïe Fuller, the Parisian dancer, put these effects
to good use, timing her movements in response to atmospheric lighting. Wafting diaphanous veils
under ever-changing coloured lights, she inspired Toulouse-Lautrec and D. W. Griffith and
influenced Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham. The Wagnerian spirit affected others, too.
Kandinsky wrote stage pieces from 1909 to exemplify the new values: "The Yellow Sound", "Black
and White" and "Violet", employed the colours themselves, in motion to music, as the central
characters. Sadly, his works proved too difficult to mount. Around the same time, Schoenberg
composed "The Lucky Hand", to be accompanied by a range of colours according to no known
theory:

"Tone-colour melodies! How acute the senses that would be able to perceive them! How
high the development of spirit that could find pleasure in such subtle things! In such a
domain, who dares ask for theory?"

Of course, he did have theories, primarily the twelve-tone system that used the chromatic scale
as its fundamental unit. Wagner had introduced greater colour to orchestration and melody by
including chromatic variations beyond the scope of orthodox classical forms. Schoenberg, the
painter and composer, sought to order the cacophony that could result from excessive
chromaticism: in "The Lucky Hand", musical chromatics and visual chroma seemed intended to
meet.
A major influence on composers at the time was the introduction of a new kind of musical scale,
which we have inherited today. Modern keyboards, both acoustic and electric, employ a basic
method of tuning called equal temperament, whereby the octave is evenly divided into twelve
semitones by a logarithmic progression. The octave (an interval between two notes of the same
name, created by doubling the frequency of the lower note) is the only remaining aspect of Western
music that might be said to accord with natural laws. The bottom A on the piano has its frequency
doubled seven times over, producing a cycle of seven octaves, from A to A, before the end of the
keyboard is reached. This man-made construct gives us a mathematical and homogeneous system
for organising sound into music across the audible range.
Equal temperament became available with improvements in piano manufacture in the late 19th
century, though it is a much older idea. The ancient Greeks had developed a close arrangement of
semitones - called the chromatic genus - to supply nuances, or musical colouring, unavailable with
the diatonic. (Boethius had likened their difference to surfaces that changed colour when turned,
possibly having peacocks' tails or turtledoves' necks in mind.) Derived from chroma, the Greek
word for colour, the musical term 'chromatic' had crossed back over into painting in the 17th
century, along with 'harmony'. Scientists of the era calculated the position of each note in a
chromatic scale of equal temperament, though it was primarily a theoretical exercise. And Isaac
Newton used the scale, in his first description of some important experiments; the colours of thin
plates, similar to those on oil slicks, were separated into spectral arrays of equally-tempered
proportions.

Though Newton's "Opticks" went some way to provide a consensual model of the spectrum, his
colour-music analogy of ROYGBIV was no more than a pretty conceit. In a sense, it is the
prolongation of a medieval tradition, which joined music theory with other mathematical arts -
specifically arithmetic, geometry and astronomy - in the quadrivium studied at universities. Since
optics was essentially a geometric discipline, the inclusion of a musical component gave Newton's
conclusions an extra stamp of academic authority. Descartes, Huygens, and many others of
Newton's peers wrote on the subject, as would Euler and d'Alembert among the scientists that
followed them. The association of music with colour was also acceptable, following a philosophical
tradition that ranked sight and hearing at the top of a hierarchy of the five senses. Since Plato and
Aristotle, colour and light, along with form, were considered the sole means by which we detect
objects visually, while music was considered the most refined form (and the most readily analyzed)
of auditory stimulus. While Castel might question the ROYGBIV colour-music code that Newton
stipulated, he did not doubt that such a correspondence existed. Nor did Euler: though he felt his
own theory of light superior, he adopted the code with little alteration. It suited Euler's wave theory
of light (an hypothesis popular in some circles, as distinct from Newton's corpuscular theory),
comparing sound travelling through air to movement of light through an aether. The belief in an
overarching unity of colour and music continued, and even today parallels are being drawn,
between sound and pure, spectral light.
 Illustration 6 : "MUSIC", Luigi Russolo, 1911.
Though he joined the Futurists as a militant painter, Russolo soon turned
his attention to music. He created a range of novel instruments, called
intonarumori, and published "The Art of Noises" in 1916. The musical and
artistic elite of Europe, as well as the press and rowdy Dada protesters
attended his concerts. But talking pictures curtailed Russolo’s concert
career in the 1930s, and he turned to studying folk music and Eastern
mysticism (unlike many other Futurists, he avoided joining the Fascisti). By
trying to break down the distinction between musical sound and everyday
noise, in exploiting the secondary vibrations of his instruments, Russolo
prefigured the concrete music of the 1950s. His legacy remains in computer
music, where his notation system is still used.
Russolo's painting might suggest a belief in correspondences of colour to
music. The clearest clue is provided in a manifesto on "The Painting of
Sounds, Noises and Smells", by his comrade Carlo Carrà: - "...rrrrrrreds that
shouuuuuuut, greeeeeeeeeeeens that screeeeeeam, yellows, as violent as
can be." Other Futurists, the brothers Ginna and Corra, committed
themselves to a spectral colour-music code inspired by their Theosophical
beliefs. Bruno Corra's "Abstract Cinema-Chromatic Music" provides an
intriguing account of the techniques the brothers used, employing the code
first on a colour piano then translating the effects to film in 1910-12.

Music has evolved over millennia, through many

compromises, to a relatively 'impure' state, and its contrived
formulae are not echoed in the natural phenomena of the spectrum. The idea of a colour-music
code lost much of its importance for scientists in the 19th century. Many, like Thomas Young and
Hermann von Helmholtz, wrote separate works on both music and colour. While denying any link
between the two phenomena, they still felt the need to address the claims of colour music. The
spectrum of light was found to contain no equivalent of the musical octave, let alone the intervals
within it. A comparable light octave might be envisaged by doubling the lowest red frequency, but
doing so takes one immediately beyond the range of visible light. The spectrum, from red to violet,
can barely span three-quarters of one such 'colour octave', let alone encompass the cycles of octaves
used in music. Nor can any unifying principle be meaningfully divined from the separate vibrations
of light and sound: disparities between them are clear and fundamental. To connect pitch and
colour by a relationship of frequencies would require a formula so convoluted as to be ridiculous -
not that this has stopped many from trying.
The ROYGBIV sequence retained its appeal for more general audiences; the classic status of
Newton's "Opticks" inspired many variants, with spectral colours assigned to notes of a scale. The
idea was adapted to specific purposes - as an aid in teaching music, as a theosophical
demonstration of an occult system, and so on. But oft-times it was invented anew, in the search for
a relation between the realms of the ear and the eye. Variations in colours and in notes will almost
automatically invite comparison; seekers can arrive at a colour-music code they genuinely believe
to be new, but may in fact be known of old. There are still those that marvel to discover that
frequencies of certain notes, when doubled forty times over, can fall within the measurable range of
visible light (a factor Young had noted, but discounted as meaningless). In some quarters, the size
of the spectrum has been exaggerated beyond the range of average vision, to create a colour octave.
Some have claimed to see extra colour, faintly, particularly at the red end of the spectrum. Others
have consciously squeezed the musical octave to fit the spectrum, though Helmholtz rightly pointed
out that such a process made arithmetic nonsense of the original musical proportions. Naive or
cynical, such conjuring tricks with dimensions have taken hold in New Age movements, bolstered
up by references to popular and exotic mystical beliefs. With all the variations, the most pervasive
influence on colour-music codes today remains the prototype Newton supplied in his "Opticks" of
1704.
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