Colour scale and Alexander Wallace Rimington

He even proposed that composers should write double scores.one for sound, one for color.

Rimington did not claim to have completed this new art. He described his work as laying the first stone. Color Music, like early music itself, would require many minds and many years to develop.

Born in England in 1854 and trained as a painter, Rimington approached color not as decoration but as a primary artistic material. His ambition was not to improve painting, lighting, or stage effects, but to establish something more radical: a pure art of color, freed from fixed form and placed under deliberate human control.

In 1880s, working inside his own house, he constructed what became known as the Color Organ an instrument resembling a church organ, but producing light instead of sound. Keys, pedals, lenses, prisms, and filters allowed color to be played, faded, sustained, and combined in time. For Rimington, this was not spectacle. It was instrumentation.

Rimington’s central claim was simple but disruptive: color could be treated like music.

Red occupies the lower end of the visible spectrum, violet the upper. The frequency of violet vibrations is approximately double that of red—mirroring the octave relationship in music, where the final note vibrates at twice the rate of the first.

On this basis, Rimington divided the spectrum into diatonic intervals, treating colors as if they formed a scale. These divisions were not equal in spatial distance, due to optical refraction, but were conceived as equal in vibrational relation.

Rimington frequently turned to nature to explain color mobility. He described sunsets as slow, solemn processions.gradual transformations from red to gold to blue. Rough seas under shifting clouds became fast, complex symphonies of color, too rapid for the eye to fully grasp.

Yet nature, for all its beauty, lacked something essential: musical time. Natural color change does not obey rhythm or meter. It is expressive but uncontrolled.

Reference 

1. Alexander Wallace Rimington blog post (Elsa Mateu, 2010) 

2. Eye Music (Garry Barker, 2014)

3. The Color Organ / Labyrinths vs. Gardens (Visual Music history)

Plus 94 records (Isuru Chamara)