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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and to add Black and White allows for all the grays. It's when you start mixing these that naming them is harder because there are many more variations than there are notes on our 'regular' Western scales, from A0 to G#9 if you want to stay within a practical range, and from A0 to C8 if you want to stick to a standard piano, and the way pitches repeat every 12 semitones has no real equivalent in color.

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You can also distinguish between a soprano singing vs. a baritone, or a flute playing vs. a saxophone.

It’s when you start trying to distinguish the same type of sound to the nearest semitone that it gets hard (unless trained, ideally from a young age).

I have a trick for that. I search up or down whistling from middle-C and count, that number modulo 12 is the pitch. Of course that only works for the range that I can whistle.

Even on the same instrument, skilled people can often pick out what range it is being played in due to timbre changes. However, this is much more difficult if not nearly impossible when using pure tones like a tuner. These timbre changes can even differ between two semitones depending on the physical properties of the thing producing sound. A B on a trombone is going to sound different than a Bb since B is played in 7th position while Bb is played in 1st position.

Yes, this is very clear on wind instruments where the timbre can change substantially from one note to the next. The saxophone is notorious for this, it is technically a woodwind and it is absolutely unplayable if you don't tune the individual notes as you play them, you have to use your embouchure to get the notes to match pitch. Especially noticeable when playing with other instruments.

https://www.sarahlynnroberts.com/beyond-the-staff/2020/1/30/...

There are 88 notes on a piano, but there are at least 2000 pantone colors... I'd be surprised if there are more than 10 people total who can correctly match them all.

The difficulty of both problems is understated.

I'd be surprised if anybody would be able to do the color test.

At the same time: even if people can't tune a piano they can usually fairly reliably tell when one is out of tune.

But more impressive than absolute pitch to me is to be able to identify a four-note chord at once.

A piano is particularly easy to tell if it is out of tune because most notes have multiple strings. They beat against each other horrendously when one of the strings is at a different frequency than the other. If all the strings for a single note were out of tune by the same amount most people would think the piano was fine.

Can most people tell when a guitar is out of tune? A guitar so badly out of tune it plays different notes is recognizable by almost everyone, but a guitar only a little out of tune would not be noticed by most, IME.

While the farnsworth-munsell 100 hue test is definitely doable. I'd love to see a bigger test just for the hell of it.

For all we know, there may be an equivalent light octave to the sound octave (mathematically it would make sense). The catch is that the frequency range of visible light falls entirely within a single “octave,” but then if you think about the color wheel which puts red next to violet which are at opposite ends of the color spectrum and it suddenly makes sense.

In fact it would be only about half an octave.

Unless I've done my math wrong, it's roughly a doubling of frequency between the two ends of the spectrum, that makes an octave. From Wikipedia: “A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to about 750 nanometers.[1] In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 400–790 THz.”

How do you explain optical phenomena such as the viral dress phenomenon then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Real_colours_of_dres...

That is based on the color of the illumination and this of course affects the perceived color. It's the difference between emitted and reflected light, but in the case of a comparison with musical notes it would be fair to only use emitted light.

There is no exact equivalent to reflected light with its own color illuminating a colored drawing. Though it would be interesting to see if such a thing could be constructed somehow artificially using a device that receives sounds and then somehow frequency shifts them before emitting them again. That would be a fun experiment!

> It's the difference between emitted and reflected light

Wat?

Everyone who observed that optical illusion did so by observing it on an emitted light panel.

Color perception is entirely relative. There are countless images that demonstrate this. For example: http://www.optical-illusionist.com/illusions/same-color-illu...

When we perceive emitted light color we’re also perceiving RGB emissions that are blended. I love giant LED panels that when you get close you can clearly see the individual colors. It’s a trip.

Humans are horrible (incapable?) at evaluating absolute color. It’s entirely relative.

Ah ok, that's simply an optical illusion. The brain is full of pre-processing that you can mess with in order to trick it to see things that aren't there and to shift colors around as well as to play with figure-background. But that is a case of 'bad faith', you could do the same for audio illusions, it wouldn't help to draw any further equivalence between the visual and the auditory system.

Both work on the perception of waves with a certain periodic repetition but there the equivalence ends, there is no such thing as 'timbre' in vision, we simply don't work with harmonics there and the shape of the wave in sound is very important and non existent in vision (you can see a single photon in sufficiently dark adapted conditions, your eye as a fundamental particle detector!).

You may want to amend your original statement "Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors [...]" then, because clearly that's not the case as you state yourself.

I think a Ring Modulator might have some equivalence. Depending on the frequency you set it to the ability to accurately detect the frequency of the input notes can diminish quite drastically.

But then still everyone would have the identical misconception. Clearly, that was not the case.

Part of that was variations in displays. Cheap laptop LCDs especially crush white levels and black levels if not viewed from exactly the right angle.

> Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and to add Black and White allows for all the grays.

If you're not deaf you should be able to distinguish between wide swaths of the scale too. Especially once you give the swaths names and get used to that.

> It's when you start mixing these that naming them is harder because there are many more variations than there are notes on our 'regular' Western scales

Not if you stick to pure single wavelengths. You could divide that into a mere 50 colors and I doubt people would have a chance at naming them reliably.

The weird aspect about our perception of colors is how our brains interpret them relative to nearby colors (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion#/media/File:C...)

True, but that's optical illusion territory, similar things will happen with music, there are all kinds of acoustical illusions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion

As well as the 'missing fundamental' I linked to in another comment in this thread.

If you pick some Jazz piece apart it isn't rare at all to come across a chord that sounds absolutely awful. But then you play the piece as intended and it all makes sense within the larger context of the notes/chords/intervals around that chord. This never ceases to surprise me.

Even if we can reliably identify 12 unique divisions of spectral color, that's still very different from the 12 semitones in Western music, because the 12 spectral colors would span the entire range of human spectral color perception, whereas the 12 semitones repeat every octave, and humans can hear up to 10 octaves.

“Everyone can do it, aside from those who can’t”

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