![]() So from my perspective it is even more difficult to find relations than to find differences between "notes" and "colors".Īround 1665, when Isaac Newton first passed white light through a prism and watched it fan out into a rainbow, he identified seven constituent colors-red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet-not necessarily because that’s how many hues he saw, but because he thought that the colors of the rainbow were analogous to the notes of the musical scale. Where do you define boundaries between colors (e.g, yellow-green, bright-lime, citron)? It is continuous. ![]() But the number of colors in the rainbow is completely arbitrary. Regarding 7/12 notes: music and physics yield a number of notes. There are many octaves we are able to hear. One octave on the piano, on the other hand, is just one fraction. Above and below that we are not able to perceive. One more difference is that the rainbow contains the whole visible spectrum from red (large wavelength) to violet (short wavelength). The number 7 is arbitrary, we can name many more colors and we could define many more notes (on the piano we actually have 12 in an octave). ![]() An octave of piano notes represents a set of frequencies in the acoustic "spectrum" (light waves and sound waves are fundamentally different, by the way). What we perceive as colors are only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, as I said this is just a bit of fun and does not in any way have any practical implications, since sounds at those frequencies can't be transmitted through air. (I leave the sharps and flats as an exercise to the reader.) So you can't see G (or F#), but the other notes do actually have colours. (It might be possible to see it as a very deep red colour, but I'm not sure.) However, moving up from there we get the following colours: If we go down a note to G we get $392\times 2^$ Hz $= 431$ THz, which is just into the infra-red. This can't be played as a sound wave (air can't vibrate at frequencies that are too high) but as an electromagnetic wave it's a slightly reddish orange. If we go forty octaves up from A we get a note of 483 THz. The A an octave above is 880Hz, and in general if we go $n$ octaves up we get a frequency of $440\times 2^n$. The A above middle C is defined, for modern instruments, as 440Hz. This is really more or less a coincidence, but because of it, I can point out a relationship between light and colours, just for fun. Having said that, it does happen to be the case that the range of frequencies we can see is just a little short of an octave, ranging from about 440-770 THz. (Are indigo and violet really different colours? Why don't we count aquamarine, right between green and blue?) The seven colours in the rainbow are also somewhat arbitrary. pentatonic scales in blues music) or more (e.g. It's not entirely arbitrary as you say, but there are many other choices that could have been made, and there are other cultures who use fewer notes (e.g. The seven primary notes in an octave is specific to the western musical tradition. On the most basic level, the answer is a flat no.
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