1891 Color Sound Correlation Study Tone Harmonies Frank Norton Vintage Article
Item History & Price
This historic 126+ year old ORIGINAL vintage article, Tone and Color Harmonies, was carefully removed from the Illustrated American Magazine, published in 1891.
Written by Frank H. Norton, the article is 3 pages long. Page size is 9 x12”. (00075) 4/17
Excerpt from article:
In an article published in THE ILLUSTRATED AMERICAN, No. 71, it was sought to demonstr...ate, by collating the work of those who had written on the subject, the relation of sound, and, more particularly, musical sounds, to form— showing that, as a matter of fact, such sounds, besides their other gifts, possessed the capacity of formulating themselves, under certain conditions, with the aid of certain environment, in such a manner as to become visually perceptible. The experiments of Chladni, Helmholtz, ancl, later, of Mrs. Watts Hughes, illustrated the working of natural law in this connection ; and, finally, it was shown to be possible to demonstrate automatically, by a simple mechanism, the formative capacity of sound. Dealing thus with material agencies, it was a much more simple matter to make such demonstration as is here alluded to than to present the correlation between sound and color—and, more particularly again, that between musical sounds and colors—which must be clone without the aid of demonstrative diagrams, as in the case of the present paper.
As this whole subject deals with vibrations, and those in thousands of millions, and even trillions, it can he readily seen that there must be much of the vague and indefinite to cloud its treatment.
“The character of the sensations produced upon the human organs by sound and light waves depends upon the number of oscillations which occur in the vehicle of light or sound. The length of a light wave varies from about seven hundred and sixty millionths of a millimetre, at the violet end of the spectrum, to about three hundred and ninety-three millionths of a millimetre at the red end. When these undulations (which are propagated at the rate of one hundred and eighty-eight thousand miles per second) are of such a width that three hundred and ninety-five trillions of them enter the eye in a second, they produce in us the sensation of red light. When they are so small that seven hundred and sixty-three trillions strike the eye every second, they produce the sensation of violet light. Sound, as is well known, travels a million times slower than light, its progress in ordinary air being only eleven hundred feet per second. . . . Why a certain rate of molecular oscillation should become a yellow color, another red, and a third blue, we do not, and perhaps cannot, know."
These quotations, which are from Mr. George Frederic Parsons, the translator of Balzac, show the complicated nature of the topic we have in hand. The whole subject has been very little treated upon by writers, either scientific or literary ; yet a certain choice of expression in criticism, as employed with regard both to music and painting, has faintly indicated a knowledge on the part of the inventors and users of such expressions, of something hidden and seemingly indemonstrable, which yet could he felt and measurably expressed, signifying the correlation between music and color which we are considering...
Condition: Good Condition with some light toning to the pages due to age. Small one inch closed tear at the top left front page.
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