trying to 'see' the similarity in these colours that made the Polynesians see them all as variations of the same thing.
This thread is so wonderful– I am tone deaf-really, really bad when it come to music, but from early childhood, I've had a great sense of color.... Many times, my mother would send me to buy buttons or threads or other notions for things that she was sewing.. Once in a while she would question a color of thread– but inevitable she recognized I was right.
One time, I bought "purple" thread for some fabric she saw as brown– she first looked at me as if I had two heads, and even went so far as to send me back to the store to get a spool of brown, but in the end she used the "purple thread"–
Bridget, I have seen the color cubes (and flat plates of color ranges) but I have never seen the kind of overlay you mentioned... I would love to see it. I often find myself seeing colors other define as "pink" as purple– or some browns as purple, and greys as pink– and reading this, you might find it totally weird– but it makes sense to me..
I also can automatically compensate for the difference that happen when you move from flourescent light to incandescent light, to sun light..
from a technical point of view, of course, any color can be defined as a frequence of light– and computers use RBG values, octal or hex depending on your OS– and hue, saturation and luminosity can also effect color.
There was a book on the chemical/physical nature of color some years ago– it was way beyond my math knowledge, and it discussed some of this. Music lover/students will have to help me– in western music, we use certain harmonies, (take a length of sting, pluck it to make tone 1– divide the string in half- and you go up one tone– divide again, ect..)
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But not all music uses this set of tonal values— Celtic, Chinese, and Japanese (and others) music use a total different set of tones than western sets "A , B, C, D, E, F, G" (with sharps and flats–) which is why is often sound strange–(off key, or screeching–) and is truly hated (many modern Celtic piece have be reset to western music– but most bagpipes are still set to the celtic "scales")
With color, the same is true– some cultures see different "break" points– but when these are analyzed as frequencies, they follow very fixed mathematical rules– Its as if, in a decimal based color world–they are using octal!
and I collect kaleidoscope, of course.
