Colors Podcast

I found it really fascinating how the musicians determined the musical tone of a color. I never really imagined red as a deep note, it always seemed brighter and therefore higher than blue or purple. So for the highest musical notes to be blue and purple seemed pretty strange to me.

The idea that we don't all see the same colors is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. Throw in the variation in color processing across species and that's almost overwhelming. I never realized that dogs could see blue and green tones and I can't even fathom what 16 color rods would allow a mantis shrimp to see. Even more bewildering to me is the fact that researchers have been able to add color cones to monkeys through a virus. Should the FDA ever approve of human testing, that procedure would be ground-breaking for those suffering with color-blindness.

Additionally, I had no idea that women were capable of being tetrachromats. It's difficult to imagine the actual reality of that, especially when the test performed on the woman with tetrachromacy was also successfully completed by a man who happened to have an eye for color.

While the story behind the Cambodian pigment Gamboge is tragic and leads to questions about the morality behind possessing a color that has such bloody origins, I loved learning about how pigments are naturally occurring. Although pigments are naturally occurring, some are extraordinarily rare. This brings us to the issue of Homer's depiction of the sea being wine colored. Despite the belief that he was color blind, his bizarre depictions of colors had to do with the fact that blue is the rarest naturally occurring pigment and therefore many cultures, the Greeks included, simply didn't have a name for it. Because they didn't have a name for it, blue wasn't perceived as often as other identifiable colors even when it was present.