Carla brings up an interesting point.  Some colors are
almost subjective in their description such as when tan becomes
brown.  I am glad to have had color perception when I was younger
because I know what she is talking about.

        Colors like brown are actually shades of orange and
yellow with a bit of black mixed in to make them dark.  If you
were going to compare color to sound, brown would be like a base
note that wasn't very loud and yellow or orange might be that
same note only much louder.

        The other nasty thing about trying to mechanically read
color is that there is a lot of what I will call noise in the
signal.  Very few objects in the real world are a pure color.  A
bright red dress or red electric wire looks red to humans because
that is the predominant color all right, but there is probably a
little of all other colors in some proportion or other, but we
call it red or green because that is mostly what it is.

        Sounds are much the same way.  With the exception of
electronic test equipment, we hardly ever hear a sound that
doesn't have some fuzz or noise mixed in with it.

        If we were going to electronically identify colors in
such a way as to make best use of our own brains, the device
would need to produce musical notes with the lowest notes
standing for red and the highest notes for blue and violet.
White would be a rushing sound like what you hear when your
television is on an un-used channel.  Purple would be a low tone
and a high tone mixed together.

        To really do it right, the loudness of the tones would be
set by the proportion of the colors you were reading.

        You would have to train yourself to recognize the colors
by their sound.  This would be sort of an electronic synesthesia.

Martin McCormick


Carla Campbell writes:
>A device which is, I believe, simply called the "Color Identifier" is
>sold by APH.