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!!!!1725 __ The Ocular Harpsichord (Le clavecin pour les yeux) * Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688-1757) * ''Comment :'' “As the harmony and discord of sounds proceeded from the properties of the aerial vibrations, so may the harmony of certain colours, as of golden and blue, and the discord of others, as of red and blue, proceed from the properties of the aetherial. And possibly color may be distinguished into its principal degrees, Red, Orange, Green, Blew, Indigo and deep Violet on the same ground, that sound within an eighth is graduated into tones.” ''(Isaac Newton, “Letter to the Royal Society, 1675”, In ‘The Correspondence of Isaac Newton’, ed. H.W. Turnbull et al., Vol. 1, p. 376, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1959-1977)'' * ''Translated excerpt :'' « All of which leads me to say : 1) That the more color-music is refined, artificial, scientific even, that is, nonhabitual, the more beautiful and agreeable it will be, not at first, but “col balsamo di costume” ; and thus 2) I must attempt to make it know to the taste, to the mind, to the reason, to the internal sense in order to make it felt by the external sense, the eye. ^[...^] Everyone is a bit of a physicist to the extent that he has an attentive mind capable of natural reasoning ^[...^] not on arbitrary hypothesis or particular and personal experience, but uniquely on history and on the general observation of nature and art. ^[...^] My philosophy ^[...^] considers only facts, but facts are natural, daily occurring, constant, and a thousand times repeated, habitual facts rather than facts of the moment, facts of humanity rather than facts of one man. A unique fact is a monstruous fact. » ''(Louis-Bertrand Castel, “L’Optique des Couleurs”, p. 375 &. 403, Paris : Briasson, 1740)'' * ''Translated excerpt :'' « ^[...^] Now it is analogy that renders these poetic flashes fecund in discoveries. Because what one calls among the poets and orators “metaphor, similitude, allegory, figure” ; a philosopher, a geometer will call “analogy, proportion, ratio”. All our discoveries, all our scientific truths, are only truths of ratio. And from there often the figurative sense degenerates into the proper sense and the figure into reality. » ''(Louis-Bertrand Castel, “Suite et seconde partie des nouvelles expériences d’optique et d’acoustique adressées à M. le Président de Montesquieu”, In ‘Journal de Trévoux’, August 1735, p. 1625)'' * ''Attached references :'' {small}G. Comanini. (1591^[2001^]). ''The Figino, or On the purpose of painting : art theory in the late Renaissance''. Ann Doyle-Anderson et Giancarlo Maiorino (Eds and Trans.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001 ; N. Malebranche (1674). ''De la Recherche de la Vérité''. Strasbourg : Chez George André d’Olhoff ; Karl von Eckartshausen (1752-1803), ''Color Organ'' (1788) ; Bainbridge Bishop (?), ''The Color-Organ'' (1876) ; Alexander Wallace Rimington (1854-1918), ''Colour Organ'' (1915) ; Vladimir Baranoff Rossiné (1888-1944), ''Optophonic Piano'' (1916) ; Thomas Wilfred (Richard Edgar Løvstrom) (1889-1968), ''Clavilux - Lumia'' (1920) ; Arthur C. Vinageras (?), ''Chromopiano'' (1921) ; Alexander Laszlo (1895-1970), ''Farblichtmusik'' (1925).{/small} * ''Sources :'' {small}L.B. Castel. (1725). ''Clavecin pour les yeux, avec l’art de peindre les sons, et toutes sortes de pièces de musique'', Lettre écrite de Paris le 20 février 1725 par le R.P. Castel, Jésuite, à M. Decourt, à Amiens. (Ed: transl. Ocular Harpsichord). Mercure de France, pp. 2552-2577 ; M. Franssen. (1991). ''The ocular harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel: The science and aesthetics of an eighteenth-century cause célèbre''. In ‘Tractrix (3) : Yearbook for the History of Science, Medicine, Technology and Mathematics’, pp. 15-77 ; T. L. Hankins and R.J. Silverman. (1995). ''Instruments and the Imagination''. Princeton University Press (1999), pp. 72-85, and p. 247.{/small} {br}{br}
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