The Fakery of Color in a Spectroscopic World

Hearing, if it teaches us nothing else, is a valuable lesson in sonic spectroscopy.

Here’s why:
Sound is a more honest conveyor of wavelength than Sight.

Here’s why:
We perceive sound in the frequency domain, while we perceive light in the color domain.

As sound transits from low to high pitches, or frequencies, the little hair cells in our cochleae take turns getting excited, but in a very specific way. Each hair cell can hear one and only one frequency. If the low-note hair cell vibrates, then we perceive a low-pitched sound. And so on as the pitch increases.

When multiple frequencies arrive, as they are apt to do, we can get chording of hair cells, according to (no pun of homonyms intended) which pitches are present (no alliteration intended).

I used the term ‘honest’ above because the perception of sound is a very direct affair.

Let’s contrast this with the perception of light.

Now if one is living in a ‘rod-vision’ world, as some are, only gray levels are perceived, and these are perceived as amplitudes (not frequency), as brightness (not pitches), according to the intensity of the light. If God, Nature, Nurture, the Big Bang, Phenotype, Genotype, Evolution, or Charles Darwin had considered otherwise, vision might have been a very different thing. If they had stopped at gray levels, vision would have been a more honest thing. This relates to why FM has less noise than AM if you consider what their abbreviations stand for.

But the real duplicity comes with the perception of color, which is a completely artificial, and fake construct because it artificially divides perception into three arbitrary categories of wavelength.

You see, wavelength, like pitch, is a continuously variable sort of thing. But the fakery of color tells us that there are three zones of wavelength that can be mixed and matched in an ad hoc manner, like a model strutting down a New York fashion runway, wearing clothes that will otherwise never see the light of day.

These three zones of wavelength can be roughly divided into red zones, green zones, and blue zones, and GNNBBPGEOCD has deemed it fit to equip us with three kinds of optical cells that sense these wavelengths preferentially. Adding to the exclusivity is that this club of color cells lives primarily in our central vision, in our fovea, and comes at a cost. The sensing time (aka ‘frequency response’) of color cells is much slower than the rod cells of ‘rod-vision’ world. So if we are trying to run away from a bear, or catch some poor rabbit in a prehistoric carnivorous act of hunger, we are reliant largely on our, more honest, rod-cells of optical sensing.

So forget all that. I told you all that to tell you this.

When Isaac Newton beheld the colors split by a prism and cast onto his living room wall, he discovered that white light consists of many note chords of numerous different wavelengths.

Now to be sure, the color of a purple pansy with yellow highlights is a beautiful thing to behold and surely the painter part of GNNBBPGEOCD had their glory in determining those perceptual choices. “Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” That being said, and it is definitely above my pay grade, the fact remains that color is an artificial delineation of wavelength which is a single continuously varying number.  The construct of color is separate and artificial when compared with the fundamentals of wavelength itself.

Astronomers used the wavelength part of spectroscopy (the act of determining the component wavelengths of an optical signal to determine that the sun’s atmosphere was primarily made of hydrogen and helium. An important and primal determination to be sure, for without them we could not, “Wish upon a star.”.

The early pioneers in clinical chemistry used the variation of colors of chemical reactions to deduce a patient’s blood glucose, blood urea nitrogen (BUN for kidney function), liver enzyme profiles, and cholesterol measurement. Colorimetric reactions that were specific to these substances were developed and revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Before that, anesthesia, and sterile-field surgery it was civil war doctor time, when, if all you had was a hammer (or saw), everything looked like a nail (or pile of limbs).