Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Color/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
SOME FURTHER REMARKS AND SOME PAST PROPOSALS
In various articles which have appeared upon colour-music reference has been made to cases of what are commonly called "colour-hearing"; that is to say, to instances of persons who, on hearing a given note or a particular phrase in music, always have a strong mental impression of a particular colour or set of colours. Cases of this kind are established facts, and have been referred to again and again by various well-known philosophic writers and psychologists, amongst others by Locke and Nussbaum. Little attempt has, however, been made to tabulate or systematize them, and no writer upon the subject, so far as I am aware, has yet shown that for the same notes similar colour-imaginings or sensations are aroused in various people. It would seem rather that the colours suggested are more or less arbitrary, or perhaps derived from some obscure associations, and therefore the subject has not much interest for the student of colour-music except in one important respect, namely, as a further piece of circumstantial evidence of there being some closeness of origin or common foundations in the senses and in the brain upon which, as it were, the emotional or psychological influences of colour and sound are based.
These associations of certain colours with certain sounds may perhaps have given the first impulse to some of the ideas as to a possible relationship between colour and music to which occasional reference may be found in early literature. Probably the earliest suggestion of an analogy (as distinguished from the possibility of a separate art) was made by Aristotle in the following passage:
"Colours may mutually relate like musical concords for their pleasantest arrangement; like those concords mutually proportionate."
The idea of an independent colour art somewhat analogous to that of music has also crossed a few minds at intervals during the past centuries. Since some of my earlier experiments I have made diligent search in the British Museum and elsewhere for any records of these ideas, but literary evidence of them is very sparse, and it is only within comparatively recent times that there have been more than very fragmentary or obscure allusions to the subject.
The first account I can discover of an attempt to give practical form to the conception of a colour art occurs in the following disjointed description, written from the somewhat amusingly hostile musical standpoint of the time:
"Lewis Bertrand Castel, a Jesuit of Montpellier, whose 'Physical System' ranks amongst the best philosophical works of the early part of the eighteenth century, studied vision and the nature of colours, as blended or contrasted with each other, till his imagination getting the better of his understanding he confounded the eye with the ear and associated the harmony of tints with that of sounds. Infatuated with this idea, he invented what he called an Ocular Harpsichord, which was strung with coloured tapes instead of wires, and being placed in a dark room, when the keys were touched the transparent tapes, which respectively corresponded with them, became visible; and the various successions and combinations of colours, consequent to this operation, produced effects on the sight, which his fancy assimilated to the impressions made on the ear by melody and harmony."[1]
After this curious attempt to show a correlation the subject seems to have again dropped into obscurity.
Coming to more recent speculations, an interesting book upon Sound and Colour was published by Dr. G. D. Macdonald, F.R.S., and there exists a pamphlet by the late Lady Archibald Campbell entitled Rainbow Music, or the Philosophy of Harmony in Colour Grouping. She employed what she considered to be the analogy between the octave and the rainbow for suggestions for the decoration of a room for which, amongst other materials, to obtain her colour combinations, she used coloured shells.
Professor J. Perry's experiments in Japan have also already been referred to. He and Prof. Ayrton designed an apparatus for determining the effects produced by a spot or spots of coloured light made to move in lines or curves upon a screen.[2]
The following remarkable forecast in reference to a possible mobile colour art, which appeared in the Rev. H. R. Haweis's Music and Morals, was brought to my attention when completing my first experiments:
"Colour now stands in the same kind of relation to the painter's art as sound amongst the Greeks did to the art of the gymnast. But just as we speak of the classic age as a time long before the era of real music, so by and by posterity may allude to the present age as an age before the colour-art was known—an age in which colour had not yet developed into a language of pure emotion, but was simply used as an accessory to drawing, as music was once to bodily exercise and rhythmic recitation. And here I will express my conviction that a colour-art exactly analogous to the sound-art of music is possible, and is amongst the arts which have to be traversed in the future, as sculpture, architecture, painting, and music have been in the past. Nor do I see why it should not equal any of these in the splendour of its results and variety of its applications. Had we but a system of colour-notation which would as intensely and instantaneously connect itself with every possible tint, and possess the power of combining colours before the mind's eye, as a page of its music combines sounds through the eye to the mind's ear—had we but instruments, or some appropriate art mechanism, for rendering such colour-notation into real waves of colour before the bodily eye, we should then have actually realized a new art, the extent and grandeur of whose developments it is simply impossible to estimate. . . . But what a majestic symphony might not be played with such orchestral blazes of incomparable hues! What delicate melodies composed of single floating lights, changing and melting from one slow intensity to another through the dark, until some tender dawn of opal from below might perchance receive the last fluttering pulse of ruby flame, and prepare the eye for some new passage of exquisite colour! Why should we not go down to the palace of the people and assist at a real colour prelude or symphony, as we now go down to hear a work by Mozart or Mendelssohn?"[3]
The colour organ and allied mobile colour instruments have, to some extent at least, realized the hopes expressed. It should be added that Mr. Haweis afterwards took a keen interest in the results obtained, and his death deprived the new art of a strong supporter and eloquent champion of its claims.
Shortly after one of my first demonstrations of colour-music, an article of considerable interest, by Mr. William Schooling, appeared in The Nineteenth Century, to which the editor added a footnote stating that it had been in his hands for a year or two. Mr. Schooling's views, therefore, were formed quite independently of my own, and are consequently the more valuable in support of the general theory of a mobile colour art, though, as I had been carrying out experimental work for some years previously, and had discussed various points involved with many friends, it is not impossible that some of these may have reached the writer through indirect channels. Mr. Schooling asked the following questions:
[4]"Is it possible to create an art that shall appeal to us in a kindred way to music, and to educate our perceptions so that we may appreciate the melody and harmony of sound? The analogy of colour to sound is one consideration that may lead us to think that we can perhaps answer 'Yes.' Objectively, and as a matter of physical science, the two are so far alike that both are wave-motions, though of different kinds; the pitch of a sound and the colour of a light are both dependent on the number of vibrations; violet light and high notes result from frequent vibrations; red light and low notes from comparatively few vibrations, and probably, though not of necessity, they would arouse similar sensations. The thunder of a storm might conceivably be represented by low notes and red colour, the lightning by high notes and violet light.
"The range of audible sound comprises about eleven octaves, the range of musical sound about seven; the range of visible light is less than one octave; the range of artistic colour may perhaps be less, as in the case of sound; but the seemingly narrow limits of colour to less than one octave is more verbal than real, for if we consider that the limits of musical sound lie between 40 and 4000 vibrations in a second, while the limits of visible light lie between 460 millions of millions and 680 millions of millions in the same time, it would seem probable that a larger number of colours and tints could be appreciated by the eye than notes by the ear, and that, therefore, the variation producible by combination of colours is greater than the variations possible by musical combination into chords, while the change from tint to tint could be incomparably more gradual and delicate than the change from note to note. But how far it would be possible or desirable to have scales of colour starting from different points and with intervals between the tints or colours, dependent on certain proportions between their respective vibrations, I am not prepared to guess."
Mr. Schooling went on to describe a possible colour-music instrument in the following terms:
"The first to suggest itself is naturally a series of vacuum tubes or vacuous chambers that could be had in any desired variety, that could be illuminated in succession or combination by the use of a keyboard, on playing the notes on which the electric current would pass through different tubes. Contacts would be made so easily that the most elaborate chords or combinations of colours could be played with the utmost simplicity, and the intensity of the light, corresponding to the loudness of sound, could be varied, as in a piano, by using a pedal to alter the intensity of the current, so causing the tubes to shine with a brilliant light or to glow in the softest of hues."
I think some interesting results might be obtained with an instrument of the kind suggested, though so far as I know none has been constructed; but by its means separate colours only, or at most groups of separate colours, could be produced and not compound tints, which would greatly limit its range. Any fresh proposals, however, as to new principles for the construction of colour-music instruments are to be welcomed. The points raised by Mr. Schooling as to the wider scope of a mobile colour art as compared with music are of special interest, and the notes (see p. 173) as to the immensely greater sensitiveness of the visual nerves as compared with the aural give much support to these contentions.