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The first decades of the twentieth century were a fertile time for experiments in multimedia. Even whilst the motion picture was in its infancy, composers and visual artists throughout the western world eagerly sought ways in which to combine music with projected light; well-known examples of their efforts include the part for clavier à lumières that Alexander Scriabin included in his 1910 Prometheus: The Poem of Fire and the ‘colour crescendo’ at the climax of Arnold Schoenberg's 1910–1913 opera Die glückliche Hand. According to Percy Scholes's entry on ‘colour and music’ in the 1938 Oxford Companion to Music, between 1895 and 1932 there existed at least a dozen devices that could simultaneously produce colour and musical sounds, and a book published in 2004 reproduces illustrated patent applications for no less than seventeen such devices. Most of these were short-lived contraptions that were more effective in demonstrating the eccentricity of their inventors than the quasi-scientific theories upon which they were supposedly based. One of the few devices that enjoyed a fairly long career in the limelight was the ‘colour-organ’ of Sydney-based chemist Alexander B. Hector. Based largely on newspaper accounts, this article focuses on the colour-organ that Hector demonstrated in Sydney venues from 1912 until well into the 1950s. The article puts into historical context both the turn-of-the-century fashion for ‘colour music’ and the neurological phenomenon known as synaesthesia; most important, the article details the scientific principles (based on Newtonian physics) that fuelled Hector's work.
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