i 4 6 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



poem ; but we are all aware that there has always been a ten- 

 dency to represent emotional states in terms of the language of 

 colour. Homer spoke of " black pains"; we constantly speak 

 of a black outlook, a black lie, a white lie, a black record, a 

 grey life, a colourless life, and so on. There is, in fact, growing 

 up in England a school of musicians who hold that it should be 

 possible and pleasurable to represent music chromatically. 

 Whether the general public will ever enjoy silent music seems 

 very doubtful, but it is notorious that most people derive a great 

 deal of pleasure from the display of coloured lights, illuminated 

 vapours, coloured steam, "fairy fountains," Bengal lights, a 

 house on fire, and other exhibitions in the open air. People 

 undoubtedly do like to see great surfaces or masses vividly 

 coloured as in the rainbow, the sunrise or sunset, the afterglow 

 on snowy mountains, the streamers of the northern lights, etc. 

 But whether they would care to have audible music sup- 

 pressed and to have offered them a succession of coloured 

 surfaces or patches of colour even following one another in 

 the sequence or rhythm required by music, is open to serious 

 question. Such, however, is the intention of Mr. A. W. 

 Rimington, as explained in his book Colour in Music (63), in 

 which there is much that is true and interesting. " It is un- 

 deniable," he writes, " that as a nation our colour sense is 

 practically dormant. . . . Compare our colour sense with that 

 possessed by the Japanese, the Indians, or even the Bulgarians 

 and Spaniards. . . . To my mind a widespread, refined colour 

 sense is more important than a musical one." Long before 

 Mr. Rimington's work was published, there appeared a little 

 book, privately printed at Leith in Scotland, called Chromography 

 or Tone-colour Music (23). The author assigned a colour to 

 each of the notes of the scale thus — Do = red ; re = orange ; 

 mi = yellow ; fa = green ; sol = blue ; la = violet-purple ; ti = 

 red-purple. 



Many persons have synesthesia in connection with musical 

 tones (sound-photisms) ; two reported on by Albertoni (24) 

 associated blue with the sound of Do (C), yellow with mi (E), 

 and red with sol (G). But it was discovered that they were 

 colour-blind for red (Daltonism). Now, whereas they could 

 recognise and name the other notes, they could not name G, a 

 disability which Albertoni thinks was related to the Daltonism ; 

 he has accordingly called it auditory Daltonism (Daltonismus 





