Color and the musical scale
Sunday, March 27th, 2005Edwin Land and Josef Albers have both mused that the visual image in color was the “music of the eye” with the “score” (the image itself) being assembled from the “notes” (the individual colors). Auditory music has been described as “numbers coming (to the ear) in time”.
Could it be that the color image represents analogous spatially distributed numbers? My representation of the retina defines a “spatial octave” that very surprisingly (and never seemingly recognized) corresponds to the visual band (700-400 nanometers). Might there be some logic to the assembly of color wavelengths into a visual “musical score”? The twelve tertiary colors seem to correspond to the twelve musical tones as noted in an interesting paper by Williams (”A Look at the Musical and Color Scales”). Further, the harmony of the major CEG triad in music corresponds very closely to the scaled frequencies of the primary colors (RGB).
