Music & Colour

It's been a lovely warm day, full of colour, and music too.
I was playing my French Horn along with a church organ.
It was great to be able to play at full blast!
And the vibrant harmonies throbbed in the air.

And then in the afternoon I enjoyed some time in our garden at home.
Yellow Daffodils, Bluebells and blue Grape Hyacinth, and red Tulips now.
Beautiful colours from one end of the spectrum to the other.

It reminded me of the Greek word 'Χρωμα' that I learned at the university. In English script - it sounds like 'Chroma'.
When I first read the Greek word I guessed straight away what it meant.
The subject was about harmony so 'Χρωμα' must be something to do with the pitch of a music note. A scale that uses all the notes is called a Chromatic scale.

When I looked up the Greek dictionary to check what it said 'Χρωμα' meant I was surprised to find out that it also means the colour of something. And I remembered that a Chromatograph splits up a coloured liquid into the individual colours of the chemical components.

So in Greek there is one word that means both the pitch of a note and the colour of an object. It was totally awesome! I was flabbergasted. How did that happen?

I could just believe that the Greeks understood that the frequency of a vibration determined the pitch of the sound - like a string vibrating.

But how could they possibly have known that the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation that we see as light also determined the colour of the light?

The Greek text I was reading was written in 100AD.
It wasn't modern-day Greek, nor a modern-day Greek dictionary.
It was Ancient Greek - very Ancient!
They knew nothing about radiation!

It wasn't until the 13th Century in England that the different colours of light were first observed in a glass of water by Roger Bacon. And the famous Isaac Newton first used the word Spectrum in his book on Opticks in 1671. He was lucky he didn't blind himself when he inserted a spatula (flat stick) in behind his own eyeball and made it see distorted images, including rainbow colours. Don't try it at home! Or anywhere else for that matter!!

So how could the Greeks have known over 1000 years earlier that frequency determined colour? Was it chance? Or luck? I don't know the answer? Do you?

These ancient cultures certainly seemed to know more than we often give them credit for. Well done the Greeks!