I was recently browsing a beautiful red monochrome1 site. There were a few call-to-action buttons on the page that transitioned to green on hover. Where did that brown come from?! The initial red looks great, the final green looks great, but everything between is pretty dismal. Why is that? The RGB color model Red Green and Blue are the three primary additive colors. Your browser takes an 8-bit intensity value for each of the R, G, and B components to determine the output color…

Guess what? Chemistry isn’t the only high school course built on a foundation of lies. In art class we’re taught that the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. Not only is it wrong to say that there are three true primary colors, but if we were to pick three, we’d pick a better combination. Let there be light A band of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum between 390nm and 700nm makes up the visible spectrum of light; we perceive different wavelengths within this spectrum as colors. White light is a combination of all wavelengths in the visible spectrum. Humans are trichromats, which means that we have three types of color receptors (cone cells). Our short-, mid-, and long…

Today I wanted to see what the average frequency of a song would sound like with no spectrum analysis or separation. I had a hunch that it would end up sounding like garbage, and I was totally right. If you took the average color of a beautiful painting, it would likely turn out muddy brown. Today, I created the audio equivalent: Blazo’s Misty Sapphire: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians: Kill the Noise remix of KOAN Sound’s Talk Box: These first tones were generated using the powerful, free, cross-platform audio software Audacity and a cool lisp-y language called Nyquist. Since Audacity lets you run Nyquist scripts on hand-selected audio segments, this first bit was quick and dirty:…