Luminaphone

It has been the diversion of certain modernist critics to write about music in terms of color, painting in the idiom of sound. They have pleasantly conjectured how Beethoven's Fifth Symphony would taste if the listener's auditory nerves were transferred to his lips; what sort of noise a banana would make did the observer devour it with his ears. Last week Harry Grindell-Matthews, British inventor of the "death-ray" (TIME, June 2 & 9, 1924, SCIENCE), demonstrated certain devices with which he had turned theoretical flippancies of the dilettanti into mechanical realism. It is of course an impossibility to rearrange the human nervous system so that one kind of sense impression is substituted for another, but it is quite within the scope of science to turn light into music, sound into color. His instrument, called the "luminaphone," releases light from a series of searchlights to strike through a pattern of holes on revolving disks. Each hole is the equivalent of a note of music. The light, interrupted so as to form the pattern of a tune, passes through the holes to strike selenium plates, setting up vibrations which are "amplified" as on a radio. When Inventor Grindell-Matthews placed his hand over one of the lights, a note was deadened; when all the lights were covered, all sounds ceased. The instrument has a tone like that of a little pipe-organ.