Chris_Malcolm
The spectrum -- sunlight refracted through a glass prism
It's a tiny glass prism, in fact just a pair of facets of a prismatic convex faceted "crystal" designed to spray tiny rainbow beams like this around the room when the sunlight hits it.
It's possible to change the appearance of this image a lot by mucking around with exposure etc. in post processing. None of them look quite like what I see with my eyes. This adjustment semed to give the closest approximation to what I can see while exposing the important diferences between what the camera sees and what I see. My eyes can't pick up the dim purple and magenta shades at the end of the blue which are just barely visible here, but I might be ble to see them if the room was darker. The dark grey background is actually a white wall.
The other strange difference is that each pool of a primary colour seems to be an oval, such as the red oval and the green oval, with the secondary colours formed by their intersections, such as the yellow formed where the red and green intersect. Whereas my eyes see more like bands of colour with straighter boundaries, like the illustrations in textbooks.
Isaac Newton, the inventor of the cat flap, spent a lot of time investigating colours, and decided that there were seven, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Why those? I find it much easier to see a few different greens than a few different blues. And why seven? Seems to me you could just as well argue for six or eight. Did Newton choose seven for mystical reasons? We can for example see nearly an octave of light, roughly the span of a dimished seventh, the original harmonically lowered version of the modern equally tempered diminished seventh. If sight went round in tonal circles of octaves like sound (as we hear it) then the next note past the diminished seventh of violet would be red again, or red an octave up. As the colour wheel of artists suggests.
So is it coincidence that the harmonically adjusted diminished seventh of our equaly tempered scale, at the blue end of the spectrum, is called a blue note? Is there more to synaesthesia than electrical leakage in the nervous soup of the brain?
Original: DSC03737_1X
The spectrum -- sunlight refracted through a glass prism
It's a tiny glass prism, in fact just a pair of facets of a prismatic convex faceted "crystal" designed to spray tiny rainbow beams like this around the room when the sunlight hits it.
It's possible to change the appearance of this image a lot by mucking around with exposure etc. in post processing. None of them look quite like what I see with my eyes. This adjustment semed to give the closest approximation to what I can see while exposing the important diferences between what the camera sees and what I see. My eyes can't pick up the dim purple and magenta shades at the end of the blue which are just barely visible here, but I might be ble to see them if the room was darker. The dark grey background is actually a white wall.
The other strange difference is that each pool of a primary colour seems to be an oval, such as the red oval and the green oval, with the secondary colours formed by their intersections, such as the yellow formed where the red and green intersect. Whereas my eyes see more like bands of colour with straighter boundaries, like the illustrations in textbooks.
Isaac Newton, the inventor of the cat flap, spent a lot of time investigating colours, and decided that there were seven, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Why those? I find it much easier to see a few different greens than a few different blues. And why seven? Seems to me you could just as well argue for six or eight. Did Newton choose seven for mystical reasons? We can for example see nearly an octave of light, roughly the span of a dimished seventh, the original harmonically lowered version of the modern equally tempered diminished seventh. If sight went round in tonal circles of octaves like sound (as we hear it) then the next note past the diminished seventh of violet would be red again, or red an octave up. As the colour wheel of artists suggests.
So is it coincidence that the harmonically adjusted diminished seventh of our equaly tempered scale, at the blue end of the spectrum, is called a blue note? Is there more to synaesthesia than electrical leakage in the nervous soup of the brain?
Original: DSC03737_1X