from Cinegraphic.net:

The History of Color (or Visual) Music

story © internetted, July 3, 2004 all rights reserved.

URL: https://www.cinegraphic.net/article.php?story=20040703112616343

This is an older article (Animation World Magazine, 1997) that details the long history of "color music" (visual music) from its ancient origins into the modern use of movies to create it.

"Ancient Greek philosophers, like Aristotle and Pythagoras, speculated that there must be a correlation between the musical scale and the rainbow spectrum of hues. That idea fascinated several Renaissance artists including Leonardo da Vinci (who produced elaborate spectacles for court festivals), Athanasius Kircher (the popularizer of the "Laterna Magica" projection apparatus) and Archimboldo who (in addition to his eerie optical-illusion portraits composed of hundreds of small symbolic objects) produced entertainments for the Holy Roman Emperors in Prague." from The Dream of Color Music, And Machines That Made it Possible by William Moritz