There’s only one octave with the colors so it kind of seems more like flavors. It’s less of points along a line as it is like peanut butter vs jelly vs broccoli
Why would you say there’s only one octave?
Human audible frequencies are in the range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and are logarithmic.
Human visible frequencies are in the range of 400 THz to 800 THz, and are linear.
There’s far more available distinction to be made with color than with sound, it just doesn’t interfere the same way.
An octave is a doubling of frequency. 400 to 800 THz is one octave. Color has one octave.
The way you know that is you don’t experience redness when absorbing ultraviolet light, and you don’t experience blueness when absorbing inferred light.
It doesn’t “loop around” like the A note does at 440 Hz, 880 Hz, etc.
An octave is when a doubling of frequency leads to a new waveform that stimulates the same set of neurons as the frequency an octave below it.
Ah. That makes sense. Something about the harmonics, though:
Sound generates those harmonics because it’s physically vibrating sensors in our ear, so we get a 1 to 1 translation of the waveform. Light doesn’t, because it’s received by 4 different sensors that are sensitive at different ranges and in different phases. The reason we don’t experience “blueness” in the infrared spectrum is because our infrared sensors don’t know what “blue” is.
In the same way that sandwich would taste like garbage, mixing all the colors results in “brown” which visually is sort of boring, non-differentiated color. Kind of like the way sounds are drowned out by being near lots of loud heavy equipment, brown tends to reduce the features of things, make them less distinguishable, makes them capture attention less.
